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TIRED!


So this is my first official week of summer break and my kids are still in school for another week.  Relaxing, right?? Yea... NO! I'm seriously exhausted! "What have I been doing?" you ask. Well... here is a sneak peak of my life right now.

I'm going to cheat a little bit and post my Five For Friday with Doodlebugs here. I know that this post was written on Wed, but hey.... I gotta do what I can to stay on top of things at this moment. :)
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1. I'm waking up at 5am Mon-Fri to do boot camp with my friend.  FIVE AM!!!  I seriously don't even wake up that early for work and it's summertime... the time that I'm SUPPOSE to be sleeping in. Darn you love handles!!! Curse you swimsuit season!!!! It's because of you that I'm doing this! I wanted to take a picture of me at boot camp, but the scary instructor might have made me do like 50 more lunges if I had stopped. Today I had to run around a building complex with ropes over each shoulder dragging weights behind me. I'm sure I looked like a poor Iditarod dog on her last leg.  Maybe if I'm brave enough, I may snap a shot tomorrow and I'll post the picture. It's a form of torture, y'know? This boot camp thing.

2. We are redoing our garage into a living space for our kids. What started out as a fleeting and very inexpensive thought of possibly transforming our 3 car garage into a play area/kids cave has now taken over our lives. My husband's motto is "If you're gonna do it, do it RIGHT the first time." That's all awesome and everything but before I knew it, he was ripping down dry wall, running all kinds of electrical lines, adding an air conditioning/heater unit, building a wall, more lights, switches...etc. I don't understand it but here we are now. We just put in dry wall.


The 2 car garage side will be the play area and the other 1 car garage side will be my husband's workshop.




 Notice that the washer and dryer are UNPLUGGED? They were sitting in our backyard today and so I was frantically doing all the laundry from our camping trip before the they became unusable. Which leads to this picture....

3. YUP! That is my living room under there. I promise, there is a couch in this picture. I'm glad that my little Karis was not home because poor girl would have gotten lost under that mess. Ain't nobody got time for that!



4. Since the kids are still in school and my awesome mother in law took Karis for the day, I've been taking full advantage of these past 2 days and working diligently in creating my new TPT unit. It's A LOT of work but I'm SUPER excited about it! I'm aligning our ELA Houghton Mifflin curriculum to the common core standards and creating standards based worksheets for each story... for ALL 6 themes! I'm also adding thinking maps into it and creating printables for everything. If you know anybody who is using HM for their  ELA curriculum, this is a FANTASTIC resource for 2nd grade. I looked on TPT and there isn't anything like it. I'm creating this for my grade level so I figured that I would post it on TPT as well.
Look at that HUGE box of resources I'm going through! It's going to be a VERY thorough unit.



The title page is a little wordy, no? I'd love to hear what you think.  I was just trying to fit everything on there.


5. I will be going down to San Diego to visit my sister and staying for the weekend so that my husband can finish up the garage without any distractions. I love San Diego and I always enjoy staying at my sister's house. She feeds me well..... that's love riiiight thar! :)

So that is my life this week in a nutshell. Hoping that things slow down a bit and I take full advantage of summer!

Gotta go friend. 4:45am comes pretty early here.  :/

Blessings,






School is...... OVAAAAH!! Welcome Summer!!!! Five for Friday AND My Birthday TPT SALE!!!!

More info at the end of this post :)

Hello Friends.

Yes, you read it right! I am officially on summer break as of today!! WOOOHOOOO!!!! Things have been so busy over here that I haven't even gotten a chance to post all the fun that we've been having in class. Yesterday was the last day for students and I was starting to get a bit emotional. I had a great group of kids this year... with a few difficult ones sprinkled in between, but they grew on me. I usually line them up before we walk out the door on the last day and give them my little speech of how proud I am of them and how much they've grown, etc. I ended it with, "When you walk out these doors, you will no longer beeeee...... (dah dah daahhhhh) a 2nd grader anymore!" Then I proceeded to walk them out, me all emotional inside. I was expecting to see them all emotional, too but when we walked out and I turned around, my boys were like in their own little world, just playing around CRAZILY in line and not even caring about the amazing award winning emotional speech I just gave. C'MON PEOPLE!!! The movie in my mind of how the kids were suppose to walk out.....all in tears, wailing...... holding onto my legs, begging me to keep them did not play out exactly like that. Well... ok , not AT ALL like that. It was fine though because I can always count on my girls to fill my emotional bucket of how they'll miss me and how they'll be back to help me next year. One of my sweet girls even got a little emotional with me. Ahhhhh... I knew I loved her for a reason. :)

I am combining this with my Five for Friday with Doodlebug. Except I'm gonna break some rules since I'm crazy like that. I've listed not 5...BUT 7... yes, I said SEVEN things that has happened in these past couple weeks. Yup... that's me... rule breaker.  I just love living on the edge!  <----- really though.... I just have some major catching up to do with my blogging and I don't get out much.


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1. Open House was only 2 weeks before school ended. Here are some snapshots of the night.

We had a great turnout. Our room was packed!



We read "Moses goes to a Concert" and took pictures of our hands signing the alphabet. 


These line of symmetry projects came out great!

This was another crowded station. Math facts timed tests are big in my classroom. Here, we have students timing their parents on their math facts and even competing with them!


Love these students! They are quiet and so well behaved! 


This Puzzling Letters activity was a fun one. Students write their parents a letter and cut it into a puzzle. Parents try to read the special message by putting it together on Open House. 


Our Estimation Station was a hit! The child who guessed the closest gets that WHOLE jar of candy home! That's my thing.... sugar them up then send'em home! :)



Parents loved solving their child's math story problem.



Making invitations for their family to come to Open House

All these activities (and more) are from my TPT store. It comes with all the templates, step by step instructions, and pictures of the finished project. You can pick one up here. 




 2. We had been working so much these past few weeks that we were in need of a brain break. Here is a picture of our class dressed for the Baldwin (Harlem) Shake. You can see the actual video in our previous posts.



3.  On the last week of school we worked on my End of the Year Bundle. We had memory books, letters to write to our future students in the class and to their future teacher, measuring activities to compare our growth from the beginning of the year till now, and some reflecting over the past 10 months. It was neat to see what their favorites were and how much they've changed. 







They measured themselves with the yellow yarn at the beginning of the year. The green yarn is how tall they are now 10 months later. They then measured the 2 lengths with a measuring tape and recorded their lengths. We put these yarns in a ziplock bag and stapled it inside their memory book. 

They loved to see how much they've grown!

Hand print made in the beginning of the year.

Comparing their handprints now. 

I keep these and hand them out to my new batch of students in the beginning of the year. 


Letters to their future teacher. I'm planning on giving this letter to their teacher once we get started next year. 

4. On the last day of school, we wore pajamas and we had a movie/board games day. We also made forts.



some played Monopoly in their fort

Boy's fort


Girl's fort


5. We had about 30 more minutes until school was out and so we had our crazy dance party.  Kids did the conga line and then we made two rows and had kids go down the middle. This is my awesome job sharing partner dancing with one of our boys. 


Ok, I know that it doesn't look CUH-RAY-ZEE here, but trust me, it got there. I mean, they almost called the cops on us. 


6. After we danced I needed the kids to calm their bodies down so we played Dead Fish. This is one of my favorite games at home and it works so well with my active boys. I've even had my younger son fall asleep once while playing. Hee hee. Students lay down in a comfortable position and whoever moves it out. 

This girl looks so scary.... but she was GOOOOOOD. She stayed like that the WHOLE time. Creepy, huh? LOL




7. We had about 15 more minutes left of 2nd grade and I wanted to do these awards right before they left.  I got these candy awards from Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits for FREE!!!! I LOOOOVE Free!!! I wrote up a description of why they were getting the award and added their picture to it. Then I put both papers back to back in a plastic sheet protector so that when they turned their award over, they could read and remember what I said about them. I also got them the BIG candy treats. They LOVED it and I had SO much fun announcing each award recipient.





We rolled out the red butcher paper carpet and each student got to walk down  the "carpet" while others cheered and gave them high fives. Another of  Tunstall's great ideas!!



(drum roll pleeeease...)

AND NOOOOW...... It's just not ANY sale.... it's my BIRTHDAY sale!!!! Today is my birthday and we are getting ready to go camping at the beach... you know... since I'm on SUMMER VACATION  and all!! We've never gotten out of school before my birthday before so this is great!  Anyhow, I like gifts and I figured you do, too.  So I'm throwing a 20% off  my TPT store! This includes the Open House Activities Pack and End of the Year Bundle that you just read about.

I stole borrowed this image  from Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits. I'm right there with you Reagan Tunstall... right there with you. 

Off to pack up for camping and enjoy the weekend. Thanks friend for visiting!

Blessings,
Angela Linzay


Five for Friday

Hello Friends!
Well, we are winding down over here and next week is my LAST WEEK of school! Only 2 days left and I am officially on summer break!! Woohoo! If you are not there yet, I know that y'all are getting pretty close yourself.  It was Friday and so it's time to Link up with Doodlebugs for her Five for Friday Party. Again, I know it's Saturday... but remember...I'm fashionably late. :)

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1. I did not go into my classroom this whole week! I job share and only work Mon-Wed so I was at a Thinking Maps training for those 3 days. It was seriously mentally exhausting but I LOVED it and can't wait to come back and help train my school site on it.

2. My daughter had herpangina. Yup.. that's sounds pretty disgusting, I know.. but it's really not as bad or gross as it sounds. It's like hand, foot, and mouth disease without the hand and foot. Poor girl had sores all in  her throat. She's feeling better now, which is a good thing since I thought we would have to cancel our Disneyland trip. Speaking of....

3. DISNEYLAND!!! Ok, we seriously live only 30 mins away but when someone says they can sign you and your entire family of 5 in for free... it's exciting!!! FREE is GOOD!! We took our RV down there and stayed Thursday-Saturday. We went to Disneyland on Friday from the time it opened to until our kids all passed out. It was awesome! :)
Caught a pic with Minnie!

This was Karis' first time going to Disneyland where she  was aware of what was going on. She went when she was only 1 yrs old last time. Our friend got her a "1st Visit" badge that my hubby is putting on her.



We saw SO many princesses. There were more pictures but I don't want to bore you with all of them. :)

YUP! That's how we like to bring them home... ALL TUCKERED OUT! Makes for a nice evening chatting with the hubby. :)
3. I signed up for Boot Camp. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a crazy workout group that meets like at 5:30am! Am I dumb or what??!!! 530am during summer vacation??!! This class better do some sort of magic on my body.

4. I got my Remembering the School Year Memory Book on TPT. I am getting more products on there since I just started about 2 months ago. It's a learning curve and I'm catching on how to do these units better and faster. First one took me like at least 60 hours!!!  If you don't have a fun memory book or are just looking for something different from what you've done, I would love for you to take a look at what I have. Students draw, measure, write summaries (all in a FUN way), and reflect. I also wrote a poem for teachers to give their students.
End of the School Year Memory Book

5. I got to take a nice loooong MUCH needed nap today. My honey is the best and watched all the kids while I actually feel asleep in our RV. I was going to clean it out but instead sat down, then laid down, and the next thing I knew, it was almost 3 hours later!  I really needed a vacation after our little getaway to Disneyland. It's a lot of work there. Fun, but a lot of work. I was exhausted!

There you go friends! Hopefully your week was fun and relaxing!

Blessings,
Angela Linzay