October Currently...

Just in time for Halloween, this blogging zombie has risen from the grave!! HONESTLY now, I really will try to blog more. My 5 for Friday is going to be more in depth about where I've been, what I've been up to, how I'm losing my mind...but I wanted to jump into this link because I really love doing these quick monthly updates! Thanks to Farley over at Oh Boy 4th Grade for keeping this thing going!

This year, I'm teaching Kindergarten and First Grade Special Education, and First Grade Reading Intervention! Listening to my kiddos practice their blending and sight words first thing this morning when they came in to class was music to my ears. I'm hard core LOVING that our Fall Break starts after school tomorrow, and I'll be on a red-eye flight to see my best friend from college that I haven't seen since graduation! Granted, that's only been a few months, but I feel like I'm in a long distance relationship with my best friend. I hate it. Although I'll be in LA for the majority of break, I'll still be thinking about ways to increase the rigor in intervention class - these students are behind grade level in their reading skills, so I need to bump them up to surpass grade level expectations so that they can continue to succeed in reading for years to come. To help with that, I'm really wanting a collection of leveled-readers that are REAL BOOKS and not books that were created for fluff and have no meaning…know what I mean? Yes, I've heard that "books are becoming obsolete," but there's no substitution for real texts. Students need to interact with REAL literature in order to develop appropriate reading skills, and their interests will not be peaked by fake fluff texts. I'll step off of my soapbox now. To get through these last two days of school, I'm needing some MAJOR caffeine. Thanks to my Trader Joe's Guayaki Yerba Mate tea, I think I can hang in there. Fingers crossed. Lastly, since tomorrow is the last day before break, I'm going to have a little treat for the class that is also going to help them with blending - while my support staff is doing progress monitoring testing, the rest of us will be playing a blending game that I've found, using our Smartboard! Here's a link if anyone is curious!

• Blending Puzzle

Stay tuned!  I promise I'll be back tomorrow…

xo,