Tech Museum

Joanne and I went to the Tech Museum in San Jose today. Is there a limit to how many pictures I can put on this blog?

This robot drew our picture!

Well, it sort of resembles us....
This planet Earth was the coolest thing ever.
Here I am protesting for using pig organs to save human lives.

DNA made out of books...
My forehead is hot.
This robot used blocks

How to Eat Good Food

I had a wonderful weekend of cross-country skiing and snowshoeing and playing pinochle with my family and friend. Happiness. :)

When I got home Joanne and I went ice skating in San Jose. I didn't fall! We also made sushi...

How to make a yummy Japanese meal for two very hungry girls:

1. Make green tea
2. Wash colorful vegetables

3. Cut vegetables and put them in a bowl

4. Mix tempura batter.

5. Deep fry vegetables and shrimp

6. Layer rice, avocado, cucumber, and tempura shrimp in a square thingy on top of seaweed and then roll it up.

7. Eat!

We Love Books Day

We had a fun day celebrating literacy! I kept the day pretty calm in my classroom. This picture is one of my girls during the read-in, with my autistic kid in the background spending the entire time displaying the contents of his book box. The guest author, Tim Myers, was great with the kids and a really good storyteller. The kids were also excited about the fire fighter who read a book to our class.

Happy Week

This is the craziest week but it's going well since it's stuck between two vacations. Here is my meeting schedule for the week:

Monday:
All day grade level meeting
We Love Books Committee meeting
Union meeting

Tuesday:
BTSA meeting
Bible Study

Wednesday
All day math training
Staff professional development
Tutoring
Meet with coworker to plan

Thursday:
BTSA SP meeting
(maybe go to Ashley's to watch Lost -- does that count as a meeting?)

Friday:
Vacation!!!


My secretary called me today and said someone delivered me valentine balloons and chocolate. I racked my brain trying to figure out who it could be. It turned out to be from the family that I am tutoring! They go to my church and asked if I could help their 4th grader with writing. I have been to lunch with them twice, but don't know them that well. What a smile it put on my face!

I am so excited for Valentine's Day.... we are going to have a guest author and a read-in and a fire-fighter come to read in my classroom and a valentine exchange!

Impact Retreat

This weekend I went with Impact (my Bible study) to the snow. It was a great to spend a whole weekend with them. We stayed in a cabin in Arnold, CA. We had a speaker who talked about Missions. He went to Kazakhstan on STINT (Short term missions with Campus Crusade) for a few years. It was so interesting to here about his experiences and see pictures. He came back with a wife, so it was even better to hear her perspective about life there, since she is from there.

We also went sledding. We had a nice, safe run on the left side of the cabin that I went down once but we got kicked out by the neighbors who were worried about us running over some young trees. So we shoveled a run on the left side of the cabin and I got peer-pressured into going down it. Let me say that I should have listened to my common sense, because it was hard ending into the bank of snow.

We also played lots of games and ate lots of food. Today we went to the Moaning Cavern (Mom, have we been there?).

Sorry that I have no pictures -- I was using my video camera, so I will have video eventually.

Work Hard, Play Hard

Someone pressed the “fast-forward” button on my life and left me behind. I worked from 8-5 at school today and brought boxes of stuff home to work on. My GLAD training was really good but now I have two new units to start on Monday and Rylan and I were working like crazy today trying to get those together. I have butcher paper and files and markers all over my living room right now. It is nice, though, because I am listening to Singing in the Rain (I can’t figure out why the picture isn’t working, but I’ve seen it so many times that I can picture it in my head.) Last night I went to IKEA and got a rug and pillows so I have a reading corner in my room now. Perhaps it will be my sleeping corner when I am all worn out after this weekend. Also, I have to start thinking about centers. Rylan and I convinced my principal to give us two weeks to try centers, although it is not officially what we are supposed to be doing as a school during our Language Arts block. But my kids are missing grammar and phonics and all the structure stuff in the reading/writing workshop model.

I would like it if files on my computer were color-coded. Whoever makes the next version of Windows should do that so I can make all my "social studies" files blue and all my "science" files green because I am tired of having to make sub-sub-sub folders for everything.

Here is a picture of my classroom and my new reading nook.