Five for Friday

Happy day after Thanksgiving Friends!!!

Today will be a super short post since I am out of town and get spotty reception.

Well, Thanksgiving has come and gone and every year around this time, I begin to get real sad. Not to put a damper on things, but I really REALLY love this time of year and everything just flies by soooo quickly after Thanksgiving. My friends joke all the time with me and tell me that I never really get to enjoy this season because I'm too busy worried that it will be over soon. It's like those sleepless nights when you know you only have 5 hrs of sleep, 4 hrs, 3 hrs, OH NO... now only 2 hrs of sleep left before that alarm clock goes off!   That's how it usually is for me. BUT THIS year I'm trying to sloooow things down and be in the moment. I'm currently listening to Christmas music without trying to feel stressed that I have nothing done for Christmas.

Today I am linking up with Doodle Bugs for her Five for Friday Linky Party.

Every Thanksgiving we visit my husband's family up in Northern CA. We LOVE coming here because life is slow here and we seem to be able to escape the hustle and bustle of everyday life. They live out in the country and are the MOST hospitable people ever! This year, they had 30 people over for dinner! It was a fun mix of boys and girls. My boys were super excited to see their boy cousins so that they could get down and dirty and be ALL boys! This week consisted of shooting bb guns, dirt bike riding, quad riding, digging a HUGE dirt hole, having a dirt fight, and many other fun boy activities that include getting dirt in your ears and every other crevasse in your body.

This weekend was our first time ever sleeping in the Walmart parking lot! We had a long drive home from up north and my hubby was getting really tired. And well, since I cannot pull our trailer (total length of car and trailer = 60 ft!), we had to pull over and sleep somewhere for the night. The beauty of Walmart is that they allow RVs to camp overnight in their parking lot. We did and in the morning, I walked myself in the store, bad breath, pjs, and bed head and all, and ordered some coffee and breakfast in their McDonald's. I would not at all be surprised if I showed up in some "This is what you see at Walmart"  website that goes viral. I was QUITE.A.SIGHT! I really wish I would have snapped a quick pic of myself, but I didn't.

About 2 weeks ago, I received this horrible email from TPT saying that some of my products broke some copyright rules. I was shocked! Everything I created was my original work. I contacted them and found out that you are not allowed to have the words "Daily 5" on your title page. After frantically trying to change my product name, answering emails, revising, sending out the updated resources to those who paid for it but no longer had access to it (TPT pulled those units off the site), I was able to get everything back in working order. I contacted the 2 Sisters (creators of the Daily 5) and spoke with the actual copyright rep who dinged me for my products and told her what exactly were in my resources. SHE.WAS.AWESOME!  She understood that I wasn't trying to imply that my products were endorsed by the Daily 5 and thanked me for contacting her to clarify my resources/intentions. She offered to personally contact TPT about removing the strike against me (3 strikes and you're out on TPT) and even gave me a one year complimentary Daily 5/Cafe subscription to their website! WOW!! Also, TPT was awesome in helping me out throughout this whole process! This was such a happy ending!! :)

We began decorating the house for Christmas and I LOVE it!!! I love this time of year! I wish that I could keep my decor up for more than a month but when the first week of January hits, everything is down and packed up. In the meantime, I will enjoy it while it lasts.

The reason we celebrate this season.

Princesses need to comb hair while Christmas trees are being set up.

LOVE my Dollar Store find! I found a nativity set from the dollar store. Each piece was a dollar so i guess maybe I didn't get the best deal. LOL. I do love it though and am excited to finally have Joseph in the scene. Last year when I bought the pieces, they ran out of Joseph but I still bought it knowing that this year Joseph would be back in stock. He's kinda important in the nativity scene... don't you think? Ha!

I've also always wanted a little cottage.. which I found individually at the Dollar Store, too. The fabric snow could use a lot more work but I love my little clay pieces!

Hope you had an exciting Thanksgiving weekend!

By for now Friends!

Five For Friday and My Favorite Things Party

Hello there!

I'm joining Doodlebugs for her Five For Friday linky party. I am also excited to share with you a REALLY fun party idea that I just did this past Friday.

We recently got a ping pong table and it has been SO fun! My kids love it and are actually pretty good at it. My mom came over the other day and my boys wanted to play her. My mom is 65 yrs old BUT she was on her school ping pong team in Taiwan <----this means not only is she good because she's Chinese (haha!) but she's good because she was the best on her team.  All I gotta say is that at 65, she's still got the moves!

SO SORRY for this blurry picture but it was an action shot and I just had to add it. My mama did a backhanded shot with great form! Can you see the little white ping pong ball flying over the net? Yeah... she's pretty awesome!

It was conference week this week. Although doing report cards can be a pain, I actually enjoy conference week and meeting the parents of my students on a more personal level. SO many times, I can  see why my students are a certain way. C'mon teachers... you know what I'm talking about! The apple does not fall far from the tree.  'Nuff said! LOL!

Since Monday was a holiday and Wednesday was a student release day because of parent conferences AND I only work M-W (job share), I only had a 1 day week with my students!!! YAY!!!! :) I LOVE those short weeks!

This week I got the BEST.. I mean THEEEE BEST compliment EVAH! I've been creating my Common Core Aligned Houghton Mifflin Units. I've had some really great responses from it so far.....but then at the beginning of last week I get this wonderful email! It seriously MADE.MY.YEAR!

If you use Houghton Mifflin, this is a PERFECT resource for you! I would love for you to stop by my store and download the previews. It's over 250 pages of resources! Click on the pics below.

Theme 1

Theme 2

Theme 3

I am currently working on Theme 4 and it should be out in a couple of short weeks. :)

OK, I am SO excited to share with you a TOTALLY FUN party that I threw on Friday. It is called My Favorite Things party named after Oprah's Favorite Things episode. I know that people do it differently, but I did it the way I had heard about it from a friend. I decided to go with a color scheme... red with white polka dots with accents of black.

Everyone was to find their favorite thing and buy 5 of that SAME favorite thing (valued at $7 each). We had 8 girls and it was perfect! Everyone goes home with 5 new gifts...no matter how many girls attend.

They wrote their names on 5 different pieces of paper and put them in a jar.

OK. Don't judge. This sign was last minute and so I had to hand write it. UGH! I almost didn't post it because I don't like my writing.

 Since it was cold and gloomy and we were having a yummy crock pot soup that night, I had all the ladies wear their jammies and I gave out some of my favorite things as they came in to eat... a soup bowl with comfy cozy socks.

Again, sorry for the blurry pic. :/

Instead of writing their names on their cups, I had different color ribbons tied to the base of each cup. So my friends just had to remember what kind of ribbon they had.  I saw it on Pinterest and thought that was much cuter.


Another one of my favorite things are banners! I love this chalkboard banner and sign  freebie that you can grab here. It's from Schoolgirl Style.  I made one for each of my friends and put them in a brown paper packages tied up with strings, because these are a few of my favorite things. :)

Sorry this picture is yellowy. I think the yellow walls were making some of my pictures turn out weird.

This was their favor bags with the banner and little sign inside. 

Here are some more pictures of the night! It was SO fun!

This was the sign on the food table. 

I told my friends that when they got their name picked for an item, that they had to go Oprah crazy!!! LOVE it!!! HaHa!!  They were such great sports. 

Everybody had to go up and "talk up" their favorite item. 

I asked my friends to bring their favorite coffee mug.

Everyone put on the cozy socks I gave them. It went perfect with their jammies!

We also had some fun taking some silly pictures! We found an iphone app that was a self timer for the camera. It was dangerous! I think that we could have done this all night! LOL.

That's us...regular.

"We just won our favorite thing!" face

"Something is stinky" face

"I'm confused" face.

Oh Friends... and then there were many more pics that were just embarrassing. It was such a FUN night!!! A definite annual tradition!!

Thanks for reading!

Blessings,

Five for Friday

Hello there!

Today I am linking up with Doodle Bugs for her Five for Friday linky party. This was a short week for me since I was subbed out for grade level planning on Wed and so I only had a 2 day work week (I job share M-W). :) What a great way to start my long weekend!!! :)

This week we ended our unit study. We have been taking our ELA curriculum and working with the bigger ideas in the themes listed. For Houghton Mifflin Theme 2, it was Nature Walk. SOOOOO of course, we naturally had to go on a nature walk. These students had to look for evidence of life. We put on our investigation glasses and went to work. They brought their note pads and documented all that they saw. The kids did great and found many things that showed evidence of life.

We use tickets in our class as one of our reward system.  When they earn 50 tickets, they get to chose something from our classroom behavior catalog.  My sweet girl picked to be the teacher for a lesson in class. We had her put on some teacher glasses (hot pink of course!) and she went straight to work!

It's FALL!!!! Finally, the weather is beginning to feel like it....although I hear it's suppose to get hot again.... argggg...  Anyways, with the fall candle smell throughout my house and it being decorated for the season, I'm turning up the air conditioning, wearing a jacket, and creating my own Fall weather inside my house! I LOVE ALL things Fall!!

One of my yummy Fall drinks. This vanilla bean creme brulee is SO yummy!!! Thank you Target!

Tomato soup in one of my favorite mugs!

Souplantation! This place is yummy goodness!!! It just feels like fall inside with all the soup and warm breads!

Like I mentioned earlier, I had a 2 day work week this week. Even though I was technically working on Wed, our principal subbed our whole grade level out to do some unit planning. I LOVE my grade level and meetings with them seem more like fun than work. We were able to get so much done that we all went to Panera Bread for lunch to reward ourselves.

**WARNING** Bragging ahead.

I just wanted to highlight my kids this week. They are growing so fast and are SO SO fun!!!  I know that these times fly by quickly so even though most days I am worn to the bone, I try to soak them in as much as I can.

My sweet shopping buddy.

We just got a ping pong table in our garage and this is our boys sneaking a little game before school. That'll motivate them to get ready for school early! HA! They are gooooood, too...and it's not just because they are part Chinese.... well, maybe. :)

This is me taking a picture in front of my dirty mirror. Yikes! Didn't realize it was so bad. Anyways, these are Isaac (8) and Joshua's (6) scripture memory verses. I LOVE that we are a family that hides God' word in our hearts. They recite their verses as they wash their hands and brush their teeth. LOVE!

That's it, Friends. Thanks for stopping by! Enjoy your long weekend and rest up... because Tuesday comes waaaaay too quickly :)