A Peek at My Week {5-04-14}

I hope you are having a great Sunday!  Thank you for stopping by for my weekly linky party, A Peek at My Week.  I would love it if you would link up to share your plans for this upcoming week.

I have lots, lots, lots going on this week, both at school and at home.

My son is scheduled to take his driving test this Thursday to get his driver's license.  This is really scary stuff for a mom!  If you have already been though this, I would love some tips on how to survive handing your child the keys to a car and letting them go out on their own.  It's a good thing Thursday is Positive Thinking Thursday...prayers would be appreciated!  :)

As you know, this week is also Teacher Appreciation Week.  I want to take a quick moment to thank YOU for all that you do not only for your students, but also for us fellow teachers.  One of the wonderful benefits of being involved with a blog is the wonderful friendships that begin online.  I KNOW I am a better teacher because of YOU!  Thank you for reading and sharing your ideas and comments -- always!  As for our students, they may not always say it, but they really do know and feel the difference you make in their lives every day.

Source

Last week, we began our study of mythology and my kids can't get enough of it.  They BEG me to do it every day.  (Seriously....thank you Percy Jackson!)  We are using my Mythology Museum & More product and are working on researching for our museum displays.

This week, we will also continue to read and illustrate different myths.  As I read a myth out loud, the students listen, then they have to draw an illustration to capture the message of the myth.  This is a good time to read different versions of the same myth too.  Last week, we read two different versions of Pandora's Box.  One version left hope in the box and one let it out with the other evils.  What a great discussion we had about that!

In writing this week, we are continuing to work on Opinion Writing.  My students have really struggled with adding examples to their details. They think that just because they say something, it has to be true.  (Kind of like the Internet, right???)  So I  came up with this very easy Compliments for Classmates writing activity:

1. I gave them the name of someone else in the class.
2. They had to write three strengths or talents of that person.
3. They had to give two examples for each strength.
4. Put it all together into a paragraph with an interesting grabber.

Add an illustration and you've got a cute hallway display!

Finally, have you heard about the big SALE at Teachers Pay Teachers on May 6-7 (Tuesday & Wednesday)?  My whole store will be on sale for 28% off with the code TPTXO!

This would be a great time to pick up some of my most popular products!

Great for Common Core vocabulary work with prefixes and suffixes!

Teach the skill of research before assigning research and your life will be so much easier!

Timely & fun!  Your kids will love it!!

I've got my cart loaded up and waiting for Tuesday!

Just one more thing before I go....I don't know what is going on with Blogger, but it seems like a bunch of us have been changed back to "No Reply Blogger" status (myself included this week).  If you want to check to see if this has happened to you, you can read Jivey's post here.  Also, more and more, I'm seeing the "Prove You're Not a Robot" when I leave comments and I think that's something new for many of us that we thought we may have disabled.  To check and see if this is happening to your commenters, click on the down arrow next to your name in Blogger, click on Account Settings, then Security, and you can disable the 2-Step Verification (if you want).  

OK now...What does your week look like?

An InLinkz Link-up

Thanks for stopping by!

A Peek at My Week {3-30-14} -- Spring Break Edition!

Yay!!  It's spring break!!  Time to share what I'm going to do with all my "free" time this week.

My family is returning from their band trip to Disney tonight.  I have had the WHOLE week all to myself. Yep, just me and the dogs!  Loved it, but I am looking forward to having someone to talk to at home again.  The dogs just don't cut it when it comes to conversational skills.

As you may remember, I did a major spring cleaning on my daughter's room after she left last week.  

This has gotten me in the mood to keep on cleaning!  (It's a sickness, I am sure...)  Today, I am taking ALL of my winter clothes upstairs to the guest closet and bringing down some spring/summer things.  Hear that Mother Nature???  Winter is OVER!!

I am also meeting some friends for lunch this week, but other than that, I have a whole bunch of nothing planned and that is just OK with me!  I'm going to take the week to recharge so I am ready to return to school in a week refreshed for our final quarter.  We do not have testing to prepare for because in Wisconsin, we take our state test in the fall.  I wish all of you who are preparing for the dreaded tests the best over the next few weeks!

How about you?  Anything exciting (or not exciting) going on this week?

An InLinkz Link-up

Before I go, I wanted to share a little friendly blogger tip for those of you with newer blogs. You may not know this, but when people leave comments on your blog, there is this annoying "Prove You're Not a Robot" thingy that pops up where your commenter has to enter a series of numbers in order to have their comment post.  This is supposedly to avoid spam.  

If you would like to disable this function to make it easier for people to comment on your blog, please follow these directions.  In my year of blogging, I don't think I've ever gotten any spam (knock on wood) by disabling this annoying function. (Can you tell how much I really dislike this function?)

To disable 2-step verification for commenters:

1.  In the upper right corner of your Blogger page, click on the down arrow next to your name and choose "Account Settings."

2.  At the top near the center of your page, click on "Security".

3.  In the Passwords box, next to "2-Step Verification," click "Disable".

4.  Save your changes.

Wishing you a great week!  Don't forget to come back on Thursday for my new linky party, "Positive Thinking Thursday."  You can read more about it here.

Making Commenting Easier

Thanks to everyone who linked up yesterday for my new Sunday linky party, A Peek at my Week!  I got some amazing ideas from everyone who shared.  If you missed linking up, you can still do so.  I hope to see you back next Sunday.

Sometimes it takes a little help from our friends to realize when we are making things difficult for those around us.

Take the dreaded "No Reply Blogger" syndrome.  I was one and didn't realize it until someone told me.  (And somehow after awhile, it switched back to being a "no reply blogger" and someone told me again.)

Then there is the dreaded "Prove You're Not a Robot" thing when you leave a comment.  I don't know who thought it was a good idea to make one of those boxes tiny numbers.  I mean, sometimes the pictures are so BAD that it looks like they were taken from around the corner or the letters are all mooshed together.  Even with my glasses and extreme squinting, there is no way I will decipher those hieroglyphics. 

Little did I know, I was inflicting this pain onto my commenters as well until I read a post yesterday by Lauren at The Sweetest Thing that helped me fix this.  So I think that this has gone away now and if it hasn't, could you please let me know?  I encourage everyone to visit Lauren's blog post to learn about doing away with this annoying feature.  (I know I would appreciate it and I'm sure others would too!)

Lauren also gives a link to fixing the "no reply blogger" problem, but there is also a great tutorial on Ideas by Jivey that helped me.

We all love comments and commenting.  Why not make it easier?