Summertime Blues - Part 2

Whew, that last post was long!  This one may be as well, but I will try to shorten it.

The last thing we did before we left was celebrate the 4th of July!!  It was so nice to have a good old fashioned BBQ with the family before heading back to Florida.  My in-laws are French-America.  While America is obviously important to them, they don't traditionally celebrate the 4th like I grew up doing.

My 2nd cousin Cross.

  

My daddy Jerry!

My niece Madelynn.

My 2nd cousin Cannon.

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I also got to meet a brand new cousin (at the time).  He just turned a year old! These are pictures of me holding him and my husband holding him.  Nothing is sweeter than a man holding a baby.  ;-)

 

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When we left to head home my niece Madelynn and nephew Trevor came home with us!  I was so excited and had so much planned for them to do.  We had a blast!  Here are a few photos from the week.

                                                Did I mention it's a LONG car trip?!  :-)

At the Florida Welcome Center.  They loved this chair!

We went to the movies and then to IHOP for National Pancake Day!

This is a kid after her aunts heart.  She loves painting as much as I do!

Oh, and she adores her Uncle Noel!

We went to the city pool!  This place rocked!  They had water slides and other stuff.

We did movies at home too.  We introduced them to Jurassic Park!  Of course there was popcorn!

No trip to Florida is complete without a trip to the beach!

They tried sushi for the first time....it didn't go so well by the way.  Hehe!

Heck, this one wouldn't even try it.  He demanded (okay he asked nicely) for Chick-Fil-A instead.

Did I mention that she loves Uncle Noel a lot?

This was technically after their mom had come in to town.  We went to the beach for family photos!

My summer was VERY busy and very fast!!  I wouldn't trade it for the world though.  Now it's time to get back into the "school zone" because Day 0 is approaching fast and I am vastly unprepared!  See you in the fall!

Summertime Blues - Part 1

Summertime, summertime, summertime sadness.  Why does it have to be over so soon?  I have had a wonderful summer.  We didn't take a huge vacation this year but I spent 2 weeks in Orlando at an all expenses paid professional development for Think Math with FSU-STEM program.  I got to visit my family in Louisiana and then my niece and nephew came home with us and spent a week here until their parents (my sister and her husband) came over for a week long beach vacation in Sanibel, FL.

Two weeks in Orlando seemed like a terrific idea and other than missing my husband a tons, it was.  It was an incredible opportunity to learn from some of the best in the state.  I also got to write a lesson plan for CPALMS using one of the brand new 1st grade MAFS Standards (Florida's version od CCSS).  I am so super proud of it.  As soon as I figure out how to turn it into a PDF I will offer it here.

This is just a grid image of a few of the activities we did while I was there.

I completed the PD on the 27th of June at 3:30p.  I got in the car and drove to Tallahassee where I met my husband at my moms house (this was 4.5 hours for me, 6.5 hours for him from our home in Fort Myers).  We immediately got right back into the car and head to Monroe, Louisiana.  This is an 8.5 hour drive for normal people who haven't driven already that day.  We were driving it at 8:00p.  It turned into the nightmare drive.  We were EXHAUSTED!  It ended up taking us about 11-12 hours to drive it.  Why did we do it all in one night you might ask?  Because my fathers side of the family was having a family reunion on the 28th and since my husband had never met most of them after 7 years of marriage I had decided we weren't missing it..lol.  We got to my sisters house and fell asleep and missed the first half of the reunion.  We did make it for lunch and then went immediately to my grandparents house and crashed!  It was THE single most best nap I have ever had!  :-)

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The next week was filled with so much family fun!  I got to see cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, my dad, and my sister's family and my brother's family (who lives in Georgia and made the trip for the reunion too) a ton!  Here are a few snapshots.  

Then I got to visit my grandparents graves.  I haven't been to see them since I was about 13 or so.  I am now 35.  It had been far too long.  The best part is that it was just a few days shy of 4th of July so we brought fresh flowers and flags to put out.  My papaw was a WWII veteran.

Then I took my husband for a tour of my home town city.  Now, we have been married for 7 years, but since we live about 15-17 hours away from my hometown, we don't get a lot of "touring time" while we are there because I have such a limited amount of time with family.  It was time!  Here are a few pictures we took downtown.  My hometown has SO MUCH rich history.  I think I will do a post about it soon to show you more and tell you more.

 

 

No trip to my hometown would be complete without a visit to the Duck Dynasty Duck Commander headquarters!!!

I have SOOOO much more to share but this post is long enough.  I will make another one in a few days!  :-)

I "Mustache" For Your Help!

So I have been busy creating and working this summer in preparation for next year. Let's get real, we never really "take a break"!  One of my favorite things I have created thus summer is my new job chart.  I have mine all printed and ready to go.  Just waiting to get into my room to hang it up!

There are more jobs included in the kit which you can see listed in my TpT store here!  It's free until Thursday!  We all love free stuff right?!

I also created something to use on open house Saturday.  I will attach these cute little sign to a bag of microwave popcorn and give them out to the parents and students that come to meet me!

These are not available yet in the store but will be when I figure out which way I want to go with it (pdf or publisher file).

One of my other favorite creations this summer are these cute little desk nameplates for the primary grades.  They will be in the shop by the end of the day!

The name is just there for show.  ;-)

And lastly for now, this is the new alphabet line that will hang in my room this year.  It is the color scheme I am mostly going for this year.  I like these pastels and am still in love with chevron so I will be using quite a bit of that too.  This one is available at TpT too! 

Thanks for taking a peek!

It's Been A While!

I am just terrible at remembering to blog!  I LOVE doing it, I just caught up in other stuff and forget.  And let's get real, with Common Core being put into full swing here in the state of Florida last year, I was just too exhausted from curriculum planning.  However, I am once again vowing to do a little better.  :-)

Mu summer has been pretty uneventful.  I have done some training, spent time with family, and of course lesson planning and classroom organizing.  Below are more details into all of it!!

1. I started my summer with a Kagan training.

Honestly, I went into it wanting to hate it!  I had only known bits and pieces of Kagan before hand and I was really not interested in learning about it.  I guess part of it was that I was still stuck on what I thought should go on in a classroom based on my own learning experiences.  That was 20+ years ago!!

In the training I actually won a raffle, which thrilled me!  Us teachers love free stuff!!  We really don't care what it is!  Am I right?!

After going through the training and flipping through the catalog they want you to buy from, all of the pretty pictures and the $10 coupon I had in my hot little hands, I was convinced to purchase something!  I got the Kagan Switchboards.  They are "Write-On Plastic Pouches" that have 8 great organizers included!  I can't wait to use them in my centers!

2. The second thing I did was attend a training in Orlando!

This training was amazing!  The training was a grant funded professional development opportunity through FSU, FCR-STEM and CPALMS.  What an amazing experience.  First off, the fact that it was through FSU was exciting enough!  Go Seminoles!!  Then to learn I would be doing work with CPALMS was great too.  We use this site in our school and district all of the time.  This is a site that is even used around the US by other school districts.  It is a teachers dream.  Kind of a one-stop-shop for lesson plans that are created by teachers and other education professionals.

Anyway, back to the training.  I learned Thinking Mathematics.  This is a great training that provides you with more of a research based look at math and the way it it taught in the US versus the rest of the world.  It really makes you stop and look at all of the possibilities that are before us when doing math.

3. The third thing I did this summer is visit my family in Louisiana.

I look forward to this every summer.  I mean, they live 17 hours away ya'll!  Summer is the only time that I have to go home and make it worth my while economically.  Even though I love my life here with my husband, I miss them all dearly.  Here are a few photos from the week.

My daddy!

My husband Noel and my nephew Gabriel.

My nieces Makenna and Madelynn and my nephew Trevor.

Then, my husband and I brought my niece Madelynn and my nephew Trevor home with us back to Florida where we got to hang with them while mom and dad went to Key West for vacation.  We had a blast!!

We took them to the beach,

the community pool,

and 7-11 for Slurpees!

We also had movie night (Jurassic Park anyone?!)

and just hung out.  Oh and Madelynn got to play in a good 'ole Florida thunderstorm.

 It was great quality time.  Don't tell my husband, but I think he missed them as much as I did when they left.  ;-)  I have TONS more photos, but I don't want to bore you with those! :-)

4. Something else I have done this summer is some genealogy research.

There is nothing more exciting than to trace your family roots back 9 generations!!  Yes, I have done that on both sides of my family.  I even finished scanning hundreds of photos into the computer.  They were old, some as old as the 1800's.  My grandmother inherited them from my great grandmother when she passed away.  Here is a photo of my great-grandmother and me that I found this summer.

5. The other thing that has consumed my summer is school!

That's right, we all know us teachers never really get a break.  We think about school year round.  We think about what we will do to make it better next year, what classroom management strategy with work best, what we need to tweak in math instruction so they understand it better, what reading skill needs to be made a top priority, and the list goes on!  I also can't stop thinking about what I can do to be a better teacher and being better organized.  I have also been busily creating some cool things to use in my classroom.  I will make a new post soon about that stuff!

Thanks for sticking with my post and reading it!  It's been a busy summer and I only have a few weeks left!  I think I will cherish that time and use it wisely.  :-)