Friday Favorites {9-2-16}

Although I've been sick all week and it seems like nothing was too great around here, I still want to share my Friday FAVORITES from this week!  

My first FAVORITE is this GIVEAWAY that I am co-hosting with An Apple For The Teacher!  Enter the Rafflecopter HERE for a chance to win at $25 Gift Card to TPT!!!

One of my daily FAVORITES is watching my sweet baby girl do tummy time! She just smiles, roll around and tries to giggle! She's almost got it down! Gawd my heart could just explode with love!

This thing. Guys, this is the read deal. Since I've been under the weather I haven't cooked much, so I stopped in to try out Taco Bell's breakfast, which I had never done before. I got the Breakfast Crunchwrap and it is definitely a new FAVORITE! Any time I decide to break my diet I am definitely heading to Taco Bell for Breakfast!

My FAVORITE lesson I taught this week was a lab with Skittles to walk my students through the scientific method. I feel like it's very important for them to have a good grasp on the scientific method before we begin our actual district curriculum, so we tested the question "Do Skittles dissolve faster in warm or cold water?"  They loved watching the Skittles dissolve!

My absolute FAVORITE thing each day is when I see my beautiful Pre-K baby walking down the hall with her "buckle and bubble"! She is soaking up information like a sponge and I couldn't be happier that I get to see her every day! Love this kid tooooo much!

My FAVORITE moment from this week is when I realized that I've lost 17 lbs since I started my weight loss journey in June! My face really tells the tale!

My last FAVORITE of the week is this recipe my mom made my family the other night when I wasn't feeling well enough to cook: Chicken and Potatoes with Garlic Parmesan Cream Sauce!  I love this recipe so much that I've blogged about it before, but when my mom made it, it tasted even better!   Definitely try this recipe out!

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Friday Favorites {8-26-16}

Although I'm a day late, I still want to share my Friday Favorites with you guys! I just got done with my first full week of school and it was exhausting! But I loved (almost) every second of it!

My first Favorite of the week was that one of my students brought me a cup of Braum's vanilla ice cream for breakfast! Is it totally against my diet? Yes. Did I eat every single bit of it? YES! It was so thoughtful and sweet!

My second Favorite of the week was how I taught the Scientific Method to my Science classes.  I used The Tiny Teachers 'The Cat's In The Bag' lab and my students absolutely loved it!  It made the scientific method real to them, as opposed to a set of questions on a worksheet.  I will never introduce the scientific method any other way!

My third Favorite of the week was the following two letters I received from students.  The top one is absolutely hilarious, and the bottom one is the sweetest letter I've ever received!  

My fourth Favorite of the week was when my homeroom class and I created our Social Contract.  Our district has each class create a social contract each year as a document that will reinforce how we should treat each other.  My class this year had wonderful answers!  We started with each student creating a flip book and answering the 4 questions that form the social contract.  Then we all got to discuss our answers and write them on the board.  Then I got a piece of poster board and wrote their answers on it and they all signed it.  It was a wonderful experience that truly bonded us as a class.

 My next Favorite is LULAROE!  Over the past few months I have fallen in love with LuLaRoe and a friend and I have decided to become independent consultants and actually sell their clothes! It is exciting and scary at the same time, but we can't wait to get our inventory and get started. I just hate that it will be about another 5 weeks! Patience, grasshopper!  These are some clothes I bought at online sales this week: A Carly Dress, an Irma Shirt, a pair of BUTTERY leggings, and a Cassie skirt in the bottom right!  I love them all and can't wait to wear them to school next week!

And lastly, what I would have to say was my Utmost Favorite of the week was a few nights ago when my family and I played outside. My super sexy, 30 year old husband was gettin' it on his skateboard and was even teaching our 4 year old daughter the basics!  And my 4 month old was smiling the whole time!  It was one of those rare evenings that I put all of my 'to do's' in the rearview and just took some time to play with my family. And I enjoyed every second of it!

I hope everyone else's week was as great as mine!

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Great Start Sunday!

On this beautiful, rainy Sunday afternoon I want to FINALLY tell you all about how my school year has been so far!

My year got off to a GREAT START!  I have 18 smart, happy, funny students in my classroom! We put school wide procedures and expectations in place right from the start which has made a huge difference.  Also, we were't moving in until the last second like we were last year!  Last but not least, I got a Donors Choose Project funded and got 5 Hokki Stools for my small group table!!!

Here are a few fun pics from the beginning of my year!

Bosses vs. Leaders activity! One of the best things I did this year!  Find it here!

My AMAZING Hokki Stools!

The kids love them!

Ordering Decimals activity!

Morning Meeting!  I have a different student lead it each day!

Modeling the particles in a solid, liquid and gas!

Modeling the particles in a solid, liquid and gas using cheerios. 

Practicing measuring mass of objects.

Separating Mixtures Lab.

My incredible hubby's 30th Birthday!

And that's all so far, folks!  I plan to be on here more in the future. I miss blogging and think about it all the time, I can just never find the time to do it!

40 Fridays!

It has been (about) 40 Fridays since I have even logged on to blogger!  

But I am finally back in the blogger-game!

I AM OUT OF SCHOOL FOR SUMMMMMEEERRRRRRRRRRR! 

I literally could not be happier!  I had by far the roughest year I could ever imagine.  Student behavior was awful and I found myself continually trying to connect with the boys in my class all year long with no success.  I truly felt like a failure most of the year, but I am ready to put last year in the past and start anew this upcoming school year!  Despite how hard it was, we had some good times as well!

Creating gas!

Created flotation devices to 'rescue us from Planet X'!

We made GAK!

Many times this past school year I needed to 'escape' my reality- so of course I picked up a good book to help me do it! Here are a few of my faves!  If you click on the book below it will take you to the Amazon review page!

This is an awesome book with a historical side that bounces you back and forth between past and present while a young girl fights to figure out a mystery she has uncovered about her own past!

Similar to Fifty Shades, but I liked it better.

This is a heart-wrenching book that will creep you out, give you the chills and keep you wanting more!  I'll never look at a flower the same way!

Incredible book!  I was so engaged in the story that I didn't want it to end!  Definitely check it out!

This is what I am currently reading.  This is the third book in the Callahan & McLane Series and I can't put it down!  I have read most of her books, including her Bone Secrets Series (LOVED IT!!!) and her Novella titled Veiled.

My best friend moved away last summer and she came back last week for a visit! I couldn't believe it had really been a year since I had last seen her, but it truly felt like no time had passed at all!!!

The biggest excitement in my life right now is that we are prepping our backyard for an above ground pool!  It is a ton of hard work and I am more than thankful for my wonderful husband and his best friend who have done the majority of the work!  Now just to get the ground all nice and level, top it with a layer of sand and then construct the pool! I CANNOT WAIT!!

backyard prep!!!

What our pool will look like!

Now it's play time with my baby girl! Hope everyone's summer is off to an exciting start!

Monday Meet Up!

Hello Blogville!  

Today I am linking up for the first time with The Teaching Tribune for her 

Monday Meet Up #4 linky party!  

1.  The second I hear about a new show or movie that deals with crime/suspense/action I MUST see it! Some of my favorite TV shows are 24: Live Another Day, CSI: Miami, Bones, Castle, The Following, Rookie Blue, Scandal, and Revenge!  Movies are too numerous to even begin to list them!

2.  My school is getting the opportunity next year to departmentalize!  Only a few schools in our district do it and I am super excited that we are going to be able to try it out!  My passion in teaching is Math, so of course I want to teach that.  The other subject I will be teaching is Science.  Now, to be honest, I really have never taught much Science.  Our curriculum is so heavy into reading and math that science just got pushed to the wayside each year.  I am looking forward to teaching math and science this year and to be able to throw my whole heart into teaching just those two subjects!  

3.  I desperately want to be tan!  I am not exactly sure why, but I laid out a few times in the beginning of the summer and now I am kind of obsessed!  I don't want to be so dark that I look like I rolled in Doritos or anything, but I just want to have that beautiful, golden glow! I'm almost there!  And it gives me time to myself to read and gather my thoughts.  

Well that is my Monday Meet Up for today!  Hope you enjoyed learning a few things about me!  

Don't forget to follow me on BlogLovin!  I can't wait to read about you guys!

Jamie

Life As I Know It

Five for Friday Linky!

T.G.I.F!!!!

My five random things from this week...

1.  My newest obsession:  Sabra Roasted Pine Nut Hummus and Doritos!  The mixture is perfect! I've seriously been munching on it allllll day!  Nom Nom!

2.  I tried the game called 'Scoot' to review mental math today!  One of my co-workers found it on TpT and showed it to me so I created my own.  My kids loved it!  I personally thought it took a long time (because I have so many students) but they didn't seem to mind at all!  They really loved checking their answers and seeing how many they got right!  Great review game!

3.  I have the cutest daughter in the entire world!  The other morning my husband asked me to fix her 'bed hair' so I threw it up into a little ponytail and put a big bow in it!  Come on...how adorable is this picture????!!!

4.  Today I taught a lesson on creating vivid imagery using synonyms.  My students loved taking words from passages and transforming the "voice" using what we call 'fifth grade words'!  It was a huge success!  I even had them write their own short passage with words that second graders could read and understand.  Then I asked them to give their passage to another group and have them re-write it using synonyms so that it sounded like a fifth grader would want to read it.  LOVED IT!

5.  This week we began using our Science Weekly!  My students really enjoyed it.  There is almost zero time in our curriculum for Science so they jumped for joy (literally) when I passed out these newspapers!  I had some really good pictures of my students working with them but for some reason they won't upload!  Check out the newspaper HERE!  Have you used it?  If so, let me know what you think!

Post your Five for Friday and link back up to Doodle Bugs here!

Thanks for reading!

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