Five for Friday and My Poor Blog!

Hello Friends.

This seems like the common theme among bloggers these days.... neglecting their poor little blog. School has started in full swing and sports and homework have taken over our house...mainly my living room. Every spare moment that I've had has been dedicated to finishing my 2nd grade Houghton Mifflin: Theme 2 unit on TPT.  I've had such a great response to Theme 1 that I decided to make the next theme. When I first started taking on this HUGE project (Theme 1 took 200+ hours!!!) I told myself that I would decide to create the next themes by judging how well the sales go for the current theme. I mean, I do love creating resources but it has to be worth my time, too.  Well, I've gotten really great responses from it and people even asking for theme 2!!! Wow! I was seriously humbled to think that my resource would be used in so many different classrooms. I mean, YOU think your resources are good, but will others?  Ok, more on this resource later.

Today I am linky up with Doodle Bugs for her Five For Friday Party. Okaaay.... I KNOW that I'm a little A LOT late, but better late than never, right? :) I'm gonna zip right through #1-4 so that I can spend some time on #5. You'll see. :)

1. Kids went swimming A LOT this week! It was nice to stay cool!
2. Went to the beach on Monday for Labor Day. SO fun!!
3. Short work week since Monday was a holiday! I job share so I only worked Tues and Wed. :)
4. My sweet mother in law took my little girl overnight so that I could get some TPTing done and finish my crazy long unit (260+pages!!!). Which brings me to #5..... Why yes. I WILL skip a line to write #5 because it deserves it. I want it to be all alone to highlight my next TPT product. (drum roll pleeeease.....)

5. JUST last night, I finished my TPT unit that I was just talking about in the beginning of this post.  I am SUPER excited because this theme is PACKED with cool projects and activities that make learning FUN! Here are some snapshots of what is inside this unit:

Click on the image to take you to my store

There are word wall resources for every story in this theme:

Vocabulary concentration card game.

Story unscrambling and sequencing activity

Take it to summary writing

A neat class book to store student samples of compound words with templates included. I saw this at a teaching workshop over 10 yrs ago and I cannot remember from who. If  you know, please let me know so that I can give credit where credit is due. 

A SUPER fun fishing game to teach soft/hard g sounds.

A backpack activity where students decide what they would take to go camping.

These are the items they can choose from. Students then write a reasoning for why they chose to take these items. 

SUPER ADORABLE!!!!

This goes with one of our stories that talks about animal tracks.

Gotta throw in some Depth and Complexity here for deeper learning.

*** UPDATE: If you are interested in this Thinking Map (above pic) and MANY more with Depth and Complexity icons, please take a look at my Print and Go Thinking Maps with Depth and Complexity unit. ALL maps come with samples and are EDITABLE so that you can tailor it to the needs of your classroom.  :)

SO.MUCH.FUN! Seriously! I'm VERY excited to get to this theme with my students!!! I will be taking snapshots of the class when we get here in about 2 weeks or so. I am really looking forward to them trying out all the fun things I have planned for their learning.

Hope you have a wonderful start to your week!

Blessings,