Monday Made It: NGSS

To keep me motivated to blog more often, I'm linking up with some new amazing Linky Parties! Today I am linking up with Tara over at 4th Grade Frolics for her Monday Made It!

I'm having a really hard time believing that June is almost over...I'm excited for all of the 4th of July festivities that are coming up, but my summer seems to be slipping away too quickly!

My first Made It is a set of cards for the Next generation Science Standards. When I am able to get back into my classroom in August, one of my top priorities is to create a large tree on one bulletin board for the Cross Cutting Concepts and Scientific Practices within NGSS. I've had ideas of creating a large tree, with the practices in the trunk, and the cross cutting concepts in the branches...but not sure yet. For now, I just wanted to make the cards themselves. I put the file on my Teachers pay Teachers page, and you can find that HERE. Below are two images from the document. The orange cards are Scientific Processes, the green are Cross-Cutting Concepts. 

The powerpoint file in TpT is completely editable, so you can change the colors easily, or even edit the words and use them for another purpose. 

A peek at my week...

I was blog hopping today, searching for fun new ideas (and procrastinating from folding laundry), when I stumbled across a fun new linky...



I'm usually up for anything if it gets me out of doing laundry, so I'm up for it. Here goes...

This week, my third full week of summer vacation, I have several things on my To Do List that I'd like to accomplish.

FAMILY
First on the list, is to go visit my brand new, beautiful niece that was born yesterday. She's actually my great-niece, and I can't wait to meet her!! I'm taking my 4 year old daughter to meet her as well, and she has already packed two of her own baby blankets to bring with, "in case the baby gets cold". I'd also like to go out to dinner with my husband sometime this week, as it's been about 10 months since we've done that. Sigh. Fat chance. Finding a babysitter for three kids is much harder than it was for two!

HOUSE
In my never-ending battle to keep my house clean, I will probably have to do about 38 loads of laundry, wash every dish we have in the house, twice, and sweep the floors 47 times. In addition to that, I'm working on reorganizing my storage room. If I don't blog ever again, it's because I am buried underneath rubbermaid mountain.

SCHOOL
I am one of those weird teachers that likes to do lesson plans in the summer. When I was in labor with my last child, I labored all night so I didn't get any sleep. Labor was terribly intensive, and I couldn't stand being up all night without getting something done...so I worked on lesson plans. Yup. You read that right. Making SMART lessons and working with Google soothes me. Some say it's a sickness, but I'm OK with it. My goals for this week are to get a handle on the new 7th grade curriculum that I will be teaching next year. I will still have four sections of 6th (Earth Science), but will now also be teaching two sections of 7th (Life Science). The outstanding teacher that will be sharing 7th grade with me already has done some great work finding lessons that are aligned with the Next gen Science Standards...and we share a lot of the same teaching philosophies...so I'm excited about this new assignment. What I need to do this week it look more deeply into the NGSS for Life Science, then start to dive into her lessons so I can tweak for my teaching style. I use an Interactive Science Notebook, and she doesn't, so I'll be making a lot of things for their notebooks as I wade my way through the material.

Thanks to Jennifer at Mrs. Laffin's Laughings for a great Linky idea.

New Year, New Energy,and January Currently

I don't believe in resolutions. They always make me feel bad about myself. Let's face it, I'm not giving up chocolate or cocktail hour, I'm not going to be a size 6 by summer, and my house will always be a mess. Those are the resolutions I always seemed to focus on. So, instead of resolutions, I try to look at how I've been using my energy, and where I need to focus my energy for the coming year. Below are the thoughts I have about how to spend my energy in 2014. Happy New Year everyone!

1. MY FAMILY: Always first and foremost. We already have family dinners, and I try never to do any work while the kids are awake. It makes for some late nights for me, but it's worth it. This year I want to have a game night, at least once a week. My three kiddos could definitely use to practice taking turns and showing patience, and I could use some more time without Caillou on the tv. I also want to have a date night with my awesome hubby at least once a month. I would love it more often, but I've realistic- once a month is an attainable goal. With three kids and busy lives it has been hard to find time for each other, so that's where I want to focus my energy too.

2. MY STUDENTS: Being involved in so many things (WBT, Union President, PBIS internal Coach, etc) can make my school days quite hectic. I can sometimes get into a habit of multitasking while at school, and I lose sight of my students individual needs. This year I want to put a concerted effort into being completely present with my students. When they are in the room, my only focus is on them, not the parent emails, papers to grade, meetings to plan for, or tomorrow's lesson plans.

3. WBT VIDEOS: The Whole Brain Teaching movement has completely changed my teaching life forever. My energy focus this year with WBT will be to make more videos. I haven't made any so far this school year, and I want to have some more great videos to help teachers learn WBT strategies.  

4. BE OPEN: My last energy focus for the year is to be more open to what God has planned for me. I can get very wrapped up in my own to-do lists and often lose sight of the bigger picture. I want to be more open to things and not get so frustrated when things go against the plan that I lad out. Yes, I am a bit of a control freak.

5. BE CURRENT: I am an admin on this blog, our Middle School Facebook page, the WBT Book Club, my TpT store, and my classroom website.  I want to put more energy into staying up to date on each of these, as well as stay organized in each area.

So there you go.  And now for my January Currently...(better late than never)...