Thursday, March 20, 2014

Five for Friday Linky!

Since I haven't blogged in FOREVER, I am going to cheat a little.  Here are five things I thought about blogging about since the summer and never did.


Directed drawings.  I saw Doodle Bugs' directed drawings packet, read up on starting Writer's Workshop with a drawing unit, and jumped on the bandwagon.  I picked several freebies I found online and created a worksheet to match.  They came out cute but the writing was on the sad side.  We have some work to do!


How-To writing with Oreo cookies
I loved this project and it came out super cute.  Unfortunately I don't seem to have many pics of the final project but I do have some of the kids devouring their cookies.  Because I teach second language learners I wanted to make it as simple as possible.  We stuck with only four ways they could eat their Oreo.  I'm hoping to find the time to put together a mini unit for this soon.  As they say in Arabic, in'shallah.

I'm expecting!  So it has made me very tired and unmotivated to work after work.  Hopefully things will change a bit now that I'm in the second trimester but I fully expect things to then disintegrate again once the little one comes.  But maybe I will surprise myself.

Measuring fun with Skittles
We had fun during our measuring measuring non-standard units using skittles candy.  The best part was getting to eat for clean-up!  Of course I threw in a little sorting for some extra practice.


I have worked really hard on creating a positional words unit that works for my students.  I had purchased one last year on TPT and it just didn't work for me (or them).  I wanted a super simple streamlined design that the students could really get.  When I found these cutie penguins I just knew I wanted to feature them.  I plan to have the unit up and running in my TPT store by the end of the week so stay tuned if you like what you see.

In an effort to increase my blogging and organization, I downloaded a super cute blog organizer.  Best of all, it was free!  My favorite kind of product.  You can get yours from Everyday Enchanting here.

Typical Day in the UAE

Today was a typical day towards the end of the trimester in the UAE.  I only had 17 of my 26 kiddos in my homeroom class show up today and it was a field trip day!  Okay, I admit I was a little shocked at that one.  What makes it typical?

1.  Kids tend to stop showing near a break (Spring Break in 2 weeks).
2.  I was notified of the field trip on Tuesday (today is Thursday) through the weekly newsletter.  Which meant cancelling teaching for the day and report cards are due next week.  (Can you say HELP??!  I need the students in class to finish assessments).
3. Students were leaving early for parent-teacher conferences.  Which was also only notified through newsletter.  And the leadership team (minus the principal) had no idea until this morning that we were dismissing early.
4. The weather was so hot that in the second half of our 2 hour trip to the park two of the kiddos started showing signs of heat exhaustion.  Mind you we live in the Sahara Desert, it is only March, and the park has no shade structures.
5. Only three parents of my 51 students showed to discuss student progress. :(

But it was an enjoyable day at the park (minus  just a couple issues).  How was your day?

Such a gorgeous setting!

Did not have my camera today, this is from a teacher only field trip to the park before Christmas break.  But this time as well we sat on blankets on the grass.  One of the locate teachers made sandwiches and pasta so we ate while the kids played.

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