Getting my Game On ~ The Meek Moose Rears Her Tired Head

As per usual,  I get really crappy at maintaining the blog during the school year. But it doesn't mean that I've been hiding under my covers- though some days I wish I were able to... blah.

So how did everyone's Thanksgiving break go? I ended up with an extra day, as we received about five inches of snow Wednesday morning.

Ain't it grand?  Don't get me wrong, I liked the extra day off.  It's just that this Alaskan girl can't get excited about snow.  Like- I've done that, ya know?  Kids beyond excited though.  So, yay, Winter!

Today, being the thirtieth of November, I am aware that I completely missed doing the November currently. And I will not dare to link up today, I will wait and do the December one when it comes out (in theory- you never know with me)  But I did go ahead and fill out November's just so you could see what I'd been up to in the last month:

click to go to Farley's post last month

Most of these don't need a lot of further explanation.  I will say that as far as the song goes, my favorite part is when Nicki Minaj is rapping B to the A to the N to the G to the "heyyyyyyy".  I can do that part super duper dorky, yo!

I plan to do another post about Code.org this month in honor of The Hour of Code, so I'll just leave it at that for now.

Career direction.  Always a hot topic.  Stay in the classroom, become a specialist, change grade levels- you know, all the normal thoughts you start to have after parent teacher conferences when you have that mini-breakdown about the direction your life is headed.  Today I hope to pursue a career as a full time gamer playing Sims 4 24/7.  Because there's a life I can completely control....

I got a nasty cold just before my birthday.  Nasty enough, in fact, to put me in bed on my birthday, and obnoxiously near death for my entire birthday week.  I missed all of the planned celebrations.  All of which being two.  But for me, that is quite a full social calendar.  I recovered enough the following week to go out to eat with two of my best local girls and we had Mexican food and I wore the birthday sombrero.  I would not allow the staff to come out and clap and sing for me.  That would have been too much.  But I hammed it up for the camera enough to make a random man stop and take my picture.  What he plans to do with that photo- I don't want to know.

Apparently, this thing I am doing is called Duck lips.  I THOUGHT I was just puckering up for the camera.  Since my lips are so lovely. Ha.  But whatevs.  I was not intending duck lips.  I was intending to show off my true dorkiness in the middle picture though- as I'm sure that is much more like my normal face than the other two.  Either way, all three make fantastic profile pictures for my newest experiment and #epicfail of on-line dating.

I came to the obvious conclusion that one cannot marry an outrageously rich organic strawberry farmer, regardless of how ridiculously adorable one is, by sitting around doing nothing.  So I foolishly signed up for this virtual meat market gig.

Kittens...as socially awkward as I am...as out of practice as I am...as destined to be single for all eternity as I am.... on-line dating does little more than confirm for me the death of the English language in our culture.  And how irresitible I am to the AARP crowd.  Seriously- old men LOVE me.  I get winked at eighty times a day by 65+ guys wearing cowboy hats.  And they do not know the difference between womEN and womAN.  And I'm sorry if that sounds snobby, but this English major can't handle it.  #butI'mnotsorry  I will say that I recently received an ice breaker message from someone my age, however it began with "Sup" (no, really, it started with Sup) and ended with "Bitches stay back i have no room for drama" (and the i wasn't capitalized. And this line was preceeded by an announcement that he was passionate for all things science, including vaping and hikking.)  So, if you don't mind, I will be hiding under my bed from my phone for the next three decades...

To distract myself from this travesty, I shall throw myself into my work.

Did you know there was a TpT cyber sale tomorrow and Tuesday?  Of course you did.  Here's the ad that's been blasted across your eyeballs as of late:

click to go to my store

I have put the entire store on to the maximum discount for ya'll, and even added in something new- which my children have been LOVING.

Click to go to the product

The product description sums it up for you:

Cute owls and Superheroes?!?! Get outta town!

I have a lot of students this year struggling with sight words. The words on the Dolch lists comprise 80% of everything we read – if I can help my students master these words, then I can concentrate on multi-syllabic decoding, comprehension and other reading strategies. And so can you!

To play this sight word game, students draw a card from a face down pile and read the word aloud to the group. If correct, they keep the card If incorrect, the card goes back into the pile. Bonus cards drawn either entitle the player to draw more cards or lose cards. Bonus cards are not returned to the pile after being drawn. Player with the most cards at the end of the game is the winner.

I have all five sets of Dolch words in separate games, if you want to just zero in on one needy group of students.  I have two videos here for you to see my kids playing the Pre-Primer words game with me.  I only have a couple of kids with trouble on the pre-primer list, but my class is also 80% ESOL this year- so I added in a variation to the basic game where we practiced making up sentences to go along with the words.  You'll see that in the second video.  I've found this variation of the game to be excellent practice for oral language skills with my kids.

When the game is over, you can also have your kids write down the words that they "won" and create sentences using them if you'd like to add some extra accountability to the game.

And I reallllly need to work on my positive affirmations, as I say the same thing over and over in the videos.  Maybe I'm just nervous when I film.  Or just a huge dork. As always, there is at least one kid completely off task in the background.  Just keeping it real, yo!

Enjoy the sale, kittens!