Five for Friday

1. This is my first ever Linky Party!  Is it sad that I now feel like one of the "Cool Kids"?  HaHa!  I've blog stalked for the last year and now I'm testing the waters.  And I must say the water feels pretty good.

2. My head is spinning in so many different directions right now.  We are in the midst of some home renovations, planning a vacation, and I'm trying to do a little school work on the side.  On the home front we are having hard wood flooring laid in most of the house and new carpet in the kids bedrooms. I can't wait until it's all done.  It will be like living in a new house!

3.  I'm a KY blogger and today the husband (today's his birthday) and I are taking the kids (ages 5 and 3) to Kentucky Down Under.  Teachers can get in free the month of June, so we are taking advantage.  I think the kids will LOVE seeing all of the animals.  I took a class there on a field trip a thousand years ago and my 4th graders loved it, too.

4.  I'm trying to decide whether to read Teach Like a Pirate or Guided Math next month.  Any suggestions?!?  I want to try teaching math in a different way this year.  This will be our 3rd year teaching with the CCSS and I think the students will finally have the math background to be able to differentiate more.  (The jump from our old state standards to CCSS was huge and there was little room for differentiation because we were busy trying to fill in the gaps created with the jump.) Now the students have two years of CCSS under their belts, are used to conceptual learning, and already have some background with the various strategies we will use this year.  Ahh (big sigh of relief), I'm excited to take my kids to the next level this year!

5.  Last week I created a yearly planning page (based on some Pinspiration, of course) and my team and I put it to good use last week when we met.  We knocked out our science map for the year in no time!  Next month we are going to map out math and ELA, but we spent the rest of this meeting organizing our students' Leadership Notebooks.  Our school is trying to achieve Leader in Me School status this year.  We have been implementing The Leader in Me for over two years and I have seen such great things with it!

So there you have it, a random sampling of my summer!