What a week!

After a two week break, it was back to school for me on Monday...well, actually Tuesday (I had a doctor's appointment on Monday). I'm amazed at how my teaching counterparts seem so on the ball and on task in the other part of the world. They're working, creating resources, attending conferences during their summer break. Perhaps, the only productive work I managed to do was my Whole Brain Teaching posters. (Sigh!)

I even brought my iPad to work with the intention of recording myself teach my kids the Whole Brain Teaching rules so that I could upload the video on the blog. I taught the rules (the kids and I were so proud of ourselves) but the iPad stayed in the bag. (Sigh!)

Like I mentioned in my previous post, I'm one of those that gets really excited about professional learning and then sort of fizzle out after that. (Sigh! There MUST be teachers like me out there!) So I thought the smartest thing would be to buy an ebook on the iPad...which I did. Way more cost effective. This is what I invested in.

The book's quite insightful and hopefully after the coming week, I'll have more to say about it and how I've used it in my conferences, Guided Reading and LLI.

Then I was going to work on this awesome package on teaching Procedural Texts which is the text type we are working on now. But I lost my creative streak and only managed an anchor chart on a visual procedural text. We made three of them but here's a look at the one we made on chocolate chip cookies.

 

A mind map by a student

Those chocolate chip cookies need a bit of work...I started getting a bit stressed out for the lack of creativity I possessed when my team partner and I had to deliver a spelling lesson. We had lots of resources on our table - Words Their Way, Soundwaves, Diane Snowball. It took us awhile to get ourselves sorted. But eventually, we seemed to be onto something. We looked at the "i" sound and our students drew a mind map before sorting the words into different groups.



Sorting out the words



And then as quickly as the holidays ended, the first week was over. Phew!