Five for {Woot! Woot!} Friday

Ok, my friends. Crazy week.

I'm officially back to school, as of Wednesday, so I absolutely have to participate in Doodle Bug's party and share five tasty tidbits with you. My first days were filled with lots of meetings and a few memorable activities.

First of all, I think it's very important to share with you who won my giveaway earlier this week. I really love reading the comments and ideas that you share. It really does make my heart smile, so I wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who participated.

I'm so sorry it took me so long to announce the winner. Sasha won this super cute minion craftivity and my newest brag tag pack, which I absolutely LOVE, encouraging positive character traits.

     

I love having giveaways and sharing my products with other teachers. Even though my store has been up and running for two and a half years now, I'm still surprised every time I hear to alert or see the notification that someone felt one of my products was worth using in their classroom. I hope I never lose that feeling! :)

Like I said, we went back to school this week. We had three inservice days this week. We talked about typical back-to-school need-to-know information. We learned about the new planbook.com subscription for everyone in the district. We traded in our iPads for mini iPads and learned about some new ideas to try with them. We listened to a speaker talk about rigor and relevance in lesson planning and worked on writing learning objectives from all the levels of Bloom's taxonomy. All these inservice lead to me to wonder...

What kind of inservice teacher are you? Do you try to keep yourself focused by taking notes and trying to pay attention or do you spend every moment possible off task and chatting with your neighbors? With cute notebook in hand, I'm the first kind.

I don't want to miss out on important information, and I want to be respectful to the presenter and other people around me. Do I sometimes feel it's hard to focus? Absolutely. Do I sometimes get bored with the presenter? Of course. I really think it's important to do whatever possible not to show it, though, and to be a good example to the student teachers and rookie teachers. Oy! It's disheartening when I see veteran teachers instilling bad listening habits in rookie teachers. We do well to practice those expectations we set in our own classrooms.

Here's an example of what I do when I try to stay focused during a less exciting inservice. I write my random thoughts on a post-it or napkin so I don't lose them and don't bother anyone nearby with starting a conversation.

Isn't it interesting that most inservices and professional development trainings do not present in an effective way? Does anyone else see the irony in lecturing us about lecturing as an ineffective teaching practice? Just saying. No worries, I was able to write down at least one important thing from each meeting.
                                                                                                                                

This is a little clip from an activity our second day back to school. It's going to be one of our reading incentives this year, but the kids will get to team up and play. They're definitely want to meet their goals, let me tell ya!

Previewing the reading challenge incentive :) #partofthepride
Posted by Chad Schuetz on Thursday, August 13, 2015

Hungry, hungry humans. Enough said.

We are movie-watchers. Not as much in the theater anymore because it's so, so expensive. Some movies just require the big theater screen, though.

My husband and I went to see the newest Mission Impossible tonight. I'll be the first to say that I've never been on the Mission Impossible band wagon. I think they're ok movies, but they would never be a movie that I'd turn on during a work time, even just as background noise. We really enjoyed this movie though. No wonder it's getting such high ratings.

So, if you're looking for a movie to see, we definitely recommend Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.  Two thumbs up!

Finally, I just found out that I won the Orange Hop, hosted by several Florida teachers! Yay!

You know, it makes since that there are different types (or brands?) of oranges since there are all the different kinds of apples. I wonder if people living in orange growing areas know the taste differences in the different kinds of oranges, the way many people have taste preferences with apples. I don't know that I've ever tasted a Parson Brown orange.

I can't wait to do a little TPT shopping to find more useful resources to use in my classroom. There are so many amazing sellers and products on TPT. Isn't it great to have that platform to share our hard work with each other?

Have a good weekend!