Sunday Smorgasbord on Vacation

Hi, sweet friends!

Currently, I'm enjoying my second cup of coffee with my brand new puppy sitting under my chair, my nephew watching Jake and the Neverland Pirates in the next room and a beautiful Midwestern backyard right out the windows.  (But it's literally 100% humidity outside, so we're definitely doing this blogging inside.  That's a little too much stickiness for me.)  Without any more babbling, I'm here to share my Sunday randoms with you, courtesy of one of my favorite bloggers, Michelle over at Fabulous in First.  You can check out her blog here.  Seriously.  Check it out, if you haven't before.  She's all types of fantastic.

{ONE}

Mr. Spouse and I finally added to our family.  We got this sweet, new puppy earlier this week.  On Tuesday, to be exact.  =)  She's such a little love bug, and she's been so well behaved!  We picked her up from a rescue and then we drove from DC all the way to Indiana on Wednesday.  We've been hanging out at our sibling-in-law's domicile since then, and they have a bigger dog, who has in turn made Sadie believe that she is also bigger than she is.  

These are post-play pictures, after they've tuckered each other out for the moment.  =)  Then they take like a 30 minute break and get going all over again.

{TWO}

I'm working on reading this great book right now called Smarter Charts.  It's a really great book about how to give your instructional charts more bang for their buck.  The authors focus on literacy strategies, but as you read it's easy to see how the same ideas could be using for math or science charts.  I think that the biggest take away for me has been that if you want students to use the charts you have after you've made them you have to teach the charts to kids.  It sounds so simple, and maybe it makes me sound like an idiot for not knowing this before, but that has totally been my biggest light bulb moment while reading this book.

  If you're looking for an easy read before you head back to school this book is definitely it.  It's incredibly easy to read and the layout makes it very useful.  I've read teacher books on occasion that are really dense and you have to put a lot of effort into reading them.  That's totally not this book.  It's really user friendly and there are multiple times during each section that I feel like I could use the idea/strategy/method right away.  I mean, it's summer, so I don't need to use right away, but it's on the docket for back to school charts.  =)

{THREE}

I FINALLY posted something new in my TpT store!  It's been so neglected.  :(  I always have great intentions, and then it's just hard to follow through on them all the time.  But, I just posted a new Fundations sort for unit 6.  If you're not familiar with Fundations, unit 6 is the unit when students are introduced to plurals, and the suffix s.  It aligns really well if you use Fundations, but it is also useful to introduce students to building regular plural words.  As it says in the product description, it DOES NOT include words that are made plural with -es or -ies.    You can check it out here.  So far, I have activities for the first 5 units of Fundations, and I'll continue to add to them.  I'm hoping to have units 7 and 8 up in about a week and a half.

I've been sitting at the island entirely too long now.  I need to get some family time in.  And maybe a third cup of coffee?  Have a great Sunday, friends!

xoxo