Excited

Sometimes it's the little things in life that can make me really excited

Like eating an ice cream cone with a ginormous scoop of peanut butter and jelly ice cream and chocolate sprinkles on top (which I did today)

or getting a big hug from hubs when he gets home from work

or fitting into skinny jeans especially after devouring said ice cream

Does anyone else out there have skinny jeans? I don't mean the super tight kind of jeans that are trendy...I mean skinny jeans which are the opposite of fat pants.

jeans-the jeans you bought when you were in really good shape that you keep around and try on every once in awhile just to make sure you can still get the zipper up.

fat pants--the pants you wear when you just aren't at your fittest and you don't want to deal with a zipper struggle.

Anyone?

My skinny jeans are size 6 jeans from American Eagle that I got my junior year of college. The have huge holes in the knees and frayed hems. The summer after my HSBF dumped me, I got into really good revenge shape and they were my favorite jeans that fall. Hubs remembers seeing me for the first time that school year when I was wearing those jeans, a yellow T-shirt and sporting a nice tan. He was smitten.

Anyway, in addition to feeling pretty good that I can still get them on my body ::with just a smidge of sucking it in:: I am pretty psyched about this...

www.mpmschoolsupplies.com Fun with Phonics Carpet 8'4" X 13'4" $430.65

or possibly this...

Lakeshorelearning.com Learning Letters and Shapes Activity Carpet 9' X 12' $469

Both Mrs. Bee and I want to get new rugs for our classrooms. We both have big oval rugs that I use for my good morning greeting. There are letters around the border, so each kid technically has a letter to sit on, but even with only 22 kiddos, they didn't really have enough room. I desperately want a new rug for instruction. There are a few big reasons why...

• I want a bigger rug so the kids have more room to spread out. I particularly like the first one because there are 35 little squares so potentially I could stagger the kiddos and they would have their own defined space to sit on.

• I like how both of these rugs have specific spots, so I can assign carpet spots this year. I didn't do that last year because I do think kids should have the freedom to sit where they want to, yet I had a lot of kids who talked too much on the carpet and some kiddos who routinely sat by other kiddos and were a distraction to each other and the rest of the class. I think it would make transitions to the carpet easier if kids had a special spot. 

• Having the smaller squares to sit on makes it easier to put the kiddos in rows. I had them sit in rows when we used our math trays last year and it took a lot of time to get them organized in rows. Hopefully with one of these rugs, that would be easier to do. 

• I want to have two separate areas next year--one for morning meeting and a reading corner and another for reading and math instruction. Sometimes my kiddos had confusion about how to sit when I was teaching. I only wanted them on letters (in an oval) for our greeting, but often when they would transition to the carpet they would sit on letters during instruction time and clump together like a bunch of grapes. With two distinct areas, I think seating arrangements will be clearer. 

The drawback to getting a new rug is that they are SO spendy. Ugh! We do get a chunk of money from the district, so I have enough to pay for one, but it just takes up such a huge portion of that money, it leaves fewer funds for books and such ::sad face::

Mrs. Bee talked to Lakeshore and they said shipping is free and they could give us a small discount with our purchase.

I called MPM School Supply earlier today and the gentleman I spoke with said if we both buy a rug, he would give us a bit of a deal and we could pay $410 for each rug instead of $430 with free shipping. Not bad! Considering I prefer the rug from that store, it is a bonus that it would save us 59 dollars over the Lakeshore one. I have to check with Mrs. B, but I think we are going to go for it! It definitely makes a difference when a company is willing to work in a little extra discount for teachers!

Does anyone have either of those rugs? Are the little areas roomy enough for little Kinder bodies?

I am getting so excited to arrange my room for the new year. We had to put everything away at the end of the year, so I am loving the idea of starting from scratch and reorganizing my different classroom areas. I have decided to take out the little play kitchen that I had last year :: mean teacher:: in order to allow more space for a little book reading/library area. The kiddos LOVED the play kitchen but we barely ever had choice time during which they could use it and feelings were always hurt when a few kids got to play there on Friday and others had to make a different choice. Kindergarten just doesn't have a lot of play time included anymore (at least at my school with a half day schedule), so I feel like having a play area like that is more of a tease...yes, it does provide a great opportunity to build social skills and learn through play, but for 15 minutes once a week, I need that prime real estate for books and reading. I want my kiddos to love being in the reading area as much as they loved playing in the kitchen.

What are you excited for?

What have you been working on for the new school year?

P.S. Yearn to Learn has posted a fun Blog Mixer Linky Party to help spread the word about new teacher blogs, make new bloggy friends, and discover great teaching ideas. I am going to link up tomorrow, so stay tuned! In the meantime, check it out!

Flags!

A few days ago I shared that I want to incorporate some learning about different countries/cultures with our letter practice this school year. We focus on one letter per week in Kindergarten, so I thought it would be fun to choose one country that begins with each letter of the alphabet so that we can be a bit more global in our classroom and learn about different places and people. I have the kids do morning work at their tables when they first arrive, so I found flags for each country we will talk about for them to color during morning work. The cool thing about coloring flags is that it will be an exercise in really focusing on the model and coloring the flags accordingly.

I changed my original country list because I couldn't find some flags. There are a few letter duplicates because I haven't made up my mind which country I want to use and Luxembourg is for x because I didn't come across any countries that start with x, so I settled for one that had an x in the name!

I saved all of the flags in a folder on my computer, but I also uploaded them to scribd in case anyone else wants to borrow. I put them into a collection so my hope is that you would be able to just print once and get them all...fingers crossed! Please feel free to use this as you like, but if you like it please let me know what your plans are! (just curious and I love ideas!)

I caved and started watching this season of The Bachelorette today since there is nothing else on TV and I had the first 5 episodes on Tivo. I am not sure how I feel about it so far. I already know about the Bentley drama and I just kind of feel like it's super cheesy. I have gotten really into in past seasons, but I am watching her beg Bentley stay when she knew from the beginning that he was there for the wrong reasons....smoothe move.

Are you watching? Who are you rooting for? Catch me up!

Wish List

It all started with an email from Amazon indicating that my free year long trial of Amazon Prime shipping is about to come to an end. ::tear:: I have until July 21st to get free next day shipping and after that, I will have to pay the fee to keep the prime shipping account in action. Because I am a student, I was able to have Prime shipping free for a year and now I can pay $39 if I want to keep the account. I guess the regular price is $79, so I am leading towards taking advantage of that deal. With all that I order from amazon, I think I will definitely get my money's worth in what I save on shipping costs.

But, since I am not sure if I will keep my Prime account, I thought I better order some of the books I want for the upcoming school year before my free shipping runs out. Mrs. Bee said I can ship anything I order to her house since I am still in Germany. I was emailing Mrs. Bee, who is my sweet friend and also teaches Kinder at my school, this morning and I got to thinking about all the amazing books I have read about on Books that Heal Kids. If you don't know about this blog, go there...now! (Actually, finish reading my post and then go there!). Roxanne has the greatest inventory of fabulous books that help teach kids valuable lessons and things about life. She summarizes the stories and gives a little blurb about why she loves the books.  In order to come up with the list of what I want to order, I just popped on over to her blog and used her list of topics to search for books that will help me with particular lessons.

I did not do a good job teaching our social skills program last year (because I don't like it) so I want to make this year better--by using stories to teach about these skills and concepts rather than scripted lessons based on photo cards. These stories will help kids to relate better and let's face it, I just love any opportunity to buy more books. I was just in the basement yesterday returning some books to their boxes so they are altogether for our big move in August and I was so happy to see all my books that I will finally have in my classroom again once our shipment arrives (in October?).

So, I searched and found many books that I would love to get and I started by just putting them in my amazon cart. I am not pulling the trigger on buying them quite yet because the cost is close to $200, but at least that gives me a place where I can refer to the titles I want and possibly find more reasonable prices on used books or something like that.

Without further ado, I present to you....my wish list! 

This first set shows books on skin color, culture, and diversity.

This next set is more focused on social skills, school rules, and behavior.

I think I am most excited for Rosemary Wells' new series of Kindergator books! She is devoting a whole series to social skills books and that is awesome!

I love the power of a good story and I hope that I can get my hands on at least some of these gems to use this year. Yes, the library is always an option, but I do much better when I actually own the books, and if they are truly great, then I want to have them for my own collection. We found that we definitely had to break out The Bucket Book on numerous occasions last year so I was glad to be able to just grab my copy and remind the kiddos about filling buckets rather than waiting days to get it from the library in order to remind the kiddos of said bucket filling.

What are some of your favorite books for teaching kids about social skills, behavior, or diversity?

Lovely

What a view!

Our weekend in Austria was am.az.ing. We relaxed, ate wonderfully delicious food thanks to Veronica's culinary skills, swam, hiked, and I actually got a lot of reading done. 

 

This was a text for one of my classes at some point and I re-read almost the entire thing in the past few days. I am still trying to figure out exactly what to write for my next paper, which is called my "specialty" paper. It is basically a lit review on my educational interest, so I have been trying to plan my outline and this book is a great resource in the areas of multicultural education, diversity, equity, cultural differences etc.

I have big plans for lots of reading tomorrow. 

These are a few on my list. 

Hubs and I have plans to do a driving trip to Lake Como, Venice, and Saltzburg in about a week and a half and a trip to Barcelona in August, so I feel like the summer is very quickly slipping away and I am going to be so mad at myself if I don't get this paper done, so it's about time I buckle down and really focus on reading, taking notes, and writing. 

So tomorrow, the day should go something like this...

grocery shop

run

read

Here are some more pics from our lovely hike...

and my favorite...

ABCs Around the World

I said I probably wouldn't post from Austria, but I have something on my mind. After a beautiful and challenging hike up the foothills of the Alps, I sat down with one of my textbooks called Affirming Diversity and did some reading while hubs played in the pool with the boys. I was reading chapters about multicultural education and the importance of acknowledging the big world that exists outside our classroom walls and p.communities. I started thinking about how much I liked introducing different ways to say hello during our morning greeting circle and started brainstorming what else I could do to add in some learning about other places. Since we study one letter each week in Kinder, I decided to choose one country that starts with each letter of the alphabet that we can learn a little about when we focus on that letter. I am picturing putting a pin in a map of the world, learning how people who live there greet each other and adding each greeting to the wall near our circle carpet, and learning something special about that location. This is what I am thinking...

Afghanistan
Brazil
Columbia
Denmark
Ecuador
France
Ghana
Holland
Italy India

Japan
Korea
Laos
Mexico
Norway
Oman
Peru
Qatar
Russia
Spain
Thailand
Uruguay United States

Venezuela
West Indies
Luxembourg (I settled for any country with an x in its name)
Yemen
Zaire

I think in order to make this happen I need to do all of the leg work this summer so the materials and info I need are already prepped. That way I can possibly give the list to parents so if they are familiar with or come from any of these countries, they can share some info with me. I know many families at my school are from Mexico so that will be a fun week. We also do a snack that goes with the letter of the week so it will be fun to think about what people in other countries might eat. I would love to learn a little about China and eat with chopsticks the week we do the /ch/ sound.

I always have lofty goals during the summer, but I am excited to try and make this happen. I love visiting all these new places I have been traveling to and I always think it's important for teachers to bring their own interests and passions into the classroom.

Please excuse the typos if there are any...I am posting from my iPad.

Weekend in Austria

Mr. Sneaker and I are driving to Austria later tonight to visit some friends. We met them in Portland when Juergen was working there for a few years. They are German, but are now living in Austria. Well, technically Veronica is Argentinian, but her family moved to Germany when she was about 9 or 10, so she lived in Germany longer and she is fluent in English, German, and Spanish! They moved from Portland back to Germany a few years ago, then we moved to Germany, then they moved to Austria. Now we are going there to visit. They have two super cute sons, Luca and Hannes and I am excited to see their new(ish) house. They moved awhile back and Mr. Sneaker visited several times during my hiatus in the US, but I haven't been yet. The last time we drove through Austria on our way back from visiting Neuschwanstein, I was blown away by how gorgeous it is and I am really excited to go back! Luckily I did about a zillion loads of laundry yesterday so we can clean clothes to pack up. 

Actually, I think we could go months without doing laundry and still have enough clean clothes. Yesterday I went through Mr. Sneaker's clothes because we just have to get rid of some stuff before we move back and I counted 133 T-shirts. Yes, that's right....one hundred thirty three. And, then this morning I found some more hidden in my wardrobe. Sneaky husband... So last night we did a little sorting and I told hubs it would be ridiculous to keep more than 100 T-shirts, so he and I went through them all and made a large pile to get rid of. The only problem is that there isn't a Good Will or anything here, so I have to figure out what to do with this big box of stuff so that I can get it out of here before hubs has second thoughts! ::hehe:: Hubs is actually very good about getting rid of stuff, but he just accumulates so much working in the world of sports that no matter how much we give away, there is an ever reproducing pile.

I feel like I am rambling. Is this post going anywhere?

This afternoon I am headed to meet my friend Christy for coffee, whom I haven't seen since I left last summer. (was that the correct usage of whom?). I am looking forward to catching up with her and then skyping with my bestie, Cristina, a bit later. Cristina and I are both just a little bit excited that there is a new book in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series...I thought it was over, but no...there's more!

I want to download it on my iPad, but it's $16.00 and that seems like a lot for a book that I can't sell, loan, or donate to anyone else. Even the hardcover is only $13. I thought that electronic books were supposed to be less expensive...oh well...We'll see if I can wait it out for it to become cheaper. Speaking of books, I read two Emily Giffin books in the last week.

Both were good, but I preferred Love the One You're With. She is the author of Something Borrowed, which is now a movie with Kate Hudson. I also re-read her book Something Blue while I was in London.  I kind of feel like it's a waste of money to buy a book that I will read in about 3 days, but I like to have something good when I travel because there is a lot of waiting around.

Now, I need to delve into some of the readings and books for my next paper! Somehow all this free time has not resulted in me working on that! I need to get it done this summer before I go back to work!

I don't think I will post this weekend, but I will be back with pics on Sunday night!