Lights... Camera... TEACH!: Seven for Sunday

Hi Friends.

I'm a bit of a rule breaker. Yes, I walk on the "wild side" ... hence the title of this post. I'm sharing seven... yes, you heard right, SEVEN fantastic things this week. I know, I'm wild, right? This is how I define "walking on the wild side" these days. Sad.

BUT what is NOT sad is what I'm about the share. I'm officially on Spring Break and I've gotten A LOT done as far as catching up and finishing one of my longest TPT units. More on that later. Today I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs for her linky party!

I was in Big Bear this weekend and this was our "home" for a couple days. We LOVE this place!! This beautiful house belongs to a very generous person in our church body. We are so thankful and blessed that we get this cabin every year for our family and a few of our close friends. We were sad that there was no snow because my little Karis wanted to build "Olaf" (from Frozen), but the weather was still so beautiful!

Relaxing on a rocker in the "backyard" with my little Karis.

Have you ever heard of these???? For a pasta lover like me this is HEA-VEN!!!! Yes, you read right....
ZE-RO calories and basically ZERO everything! Basically, they just evaporate in your mouth. LOL. No, not really but these noodles are fishy smelling so you really have to rinse and boil in hot water for 2-3 mins. They take on the taste of the sauce you put them with. I had them in chicken broth and added all sorts of veggies and chicken. It was like a very healthy version of cup of noodles!!! And for this Chinese noodle lovin' girl... that's just divine!!!!

I had an observation from my principal right before I left for break last week and it went really well. I did my lesson on close reading and coding our text. My students get a bit confused as to whether something is coded an OMG moment (!) or something that is important to the story (*). So I made this tree map to help guide them as they coded their text. It worked REALLY well! They were able to refer to it and tell me what part of the text caused which emotion for them if they coded it with an (!). I then took it to a thinking map and then a short summary writing of the article. I will be blogging about that later with pics.

I got to meet the MOST AMAZING group of bloggers last weekend. I went to a So Cal blogger meet up hosted by Kristen from Easy Teaching Tools and Courtney from Ramona Recommends. It was a blast!!!! You can read more about it here. I got to meet fantastic bloggers and felt right at home as we shared our crazy love for teaching.

Oh how sweet my little Karis is!! This is a pic of her at her school jog-a-thon. I had to throw this picture in because she is just SO.DANG.CUTE!!!!! Ok, I know I am a bit biased but really, come on... just look at her!!! She had been practicing "jog a thonning" all week long to get ready for the big event.

6. I am having a Spring Cleaning sale with many of my TPT buddies! This is a perfect time to do some shopping! I know that I will be shopping around for myself. Don't forget to leave feedback on your past purchases. It's seriously FREE money! FREE!!! And WHO doesn't like free??!!

7. So I had mentioned that I was able to work on some of my TPT resources this weekend. I revised one and finished another one.

My April Fool's unit is a FUN one!!! It's a NO PREP math and literacy resource with differentiated levels. The math pages are labeled Level 1 or 2. It's a fun thing to do for April Fool's...but don't be fooled! You can certainly use thus resources AFTER April 1st since it's just reviewing skills in a FUN way. I blogged about it more here but here are some snapshots of my unit.

Click on the picture to take you to my store

The other resource that I finished that is making me sing my Hallelujah praises is my Houghton Mifflin Theme 6 unit! I am FINALLY finished with ALL 6 themes and I cried when I posted it! Really. It was such a labor of love with every theme being about 250-300 pages EACH! Lots of ignoring mommy and wifey duties to get these done, but they are DONE!!!! Thanks to my hubby who took on extra parenting duties!!! He is AMAZING!!! This resource is common core aligned and has thinking maps, teacher cheat sheets, text dependent questions, depth of knowledge questions, and MANY MANY more research related things that bring students to the next level. There's also differentiated work in there to meet the needs of all our little kiddos in class.

Here is a sneak peak at it: