I used to get up early and enjoy Black Friday shopping with my family and friends. Oh, the thrill of the hunt! We would sit around with the flyers and create our Shopping Map/Plans after Thanksgiving dinner. I would sleep over at someone’s house (since I live the furthest away), and we would get up at 4am excited and ready to go. I did this for several years during my college years, purchasing the necessary household items at attractive prices. I can still tell you the bargains I found – blankets, dishes, small electrics, etc. Slowly over the years, I’ve grown disenchanted with this idea, and I’ve been Black Friday shopping less and less. I guess I realized, what do I really NEED anyway? We’re married, we have a nice home, our mothers spoil us, and we both have steady jobs to buy the things we need when we need them. I’m sure if we had children, things would be different.
Then, this year, something I never thought could happen actually happened. My mother, who is a manager at a retail store, was told that they would be opening on Thanksgiving and that she would have to come in and work. Since Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, I was devastated when we had to cancel it. My mom had to work overnight on Thanksgiving, then again on Black Friday. She also has to work on Saturday, by which time I am sure she will be a walking zombie. She says she is too exhausted to try and do Thanksgiving this weekend, and she just wouldn’t enjoy it. We’ve decided to push off celebrating until New Years.
So how does this make me feel about retailers, shopping, and Black Friday? PRETTY ANGRY!! I did not go out shopping last night on Thanksgiving, and I truly wished no one would have. I wished that the retailers would feel silly opening their doors and paying their employees time-and-a-half while Americans did the right thing and stayed at home to spend time with family. Unfortunately, as I saw on the news, a lot of people hit the shops last night. My mom says there was a lull between 1am and 5am at her store. Perhaps things will change next year, but the pessimist in me thinks it won’t, and this will become the acceptable holiday tradition.
So this year, I will save my money and spend the day at home with my husband and my dogs instead.
It is definitely my favorite holiday of the year. FOOD FOOD FOOD!
Between my husband and myself, we have 3 families to visit on Thanksgiving. Since my mother had to work on Thanksgiving for early Black Friday Sales (ARG!!), we only visited my husband’s 2 families this year. We will celebrate Thanksgiving with my mom on New Years when the holiday sales and craziness are over.
Dinner #1
Dinner #2
I did really well keeping with the Paleo diet – Thanksgiving is kind of a perfect holiday for that! I stuck with the meats and vegetables. I also started the day out with an amazing Paleo breakfast. You can find the recipe for the Paleo Waffles here. I made a full batch on Thursday, and I’ve been warming them up the leftovers for breakfast.
I recently purchased a copy of Practical Paleo by Dianne Sanfilippo, BS, NC. It has a wealth of information about eating whole foods. The idea of ‘Paleo,’ which is short for Paleolithic, is to return to the pre-agriculture, pre-industrialization diet that our human bodies were designed to consume. If you consider just the last 100 years, with the invention of the refrigerator and chemical preservatives, our bodies haven’t kept up evolutionarily to handle all of these new foods. You could also call Paleo the ‘Whole Foods’ diet or the Gluten-free diet. You get back to the basics of eating foods that don’t come in packages or boxes and have nothing but all natural ingredients. Flour, grains, sugar, and dairy are off-limits. Fruit, veggies, meat, and nuts are in. Pretty simply actually.
Sanfilippo explains that many of the chronic conditions and diseases that plague our modern society can be attributed to a diet high in gluten, sugar, and dairy that our bodies are unable to process. Eliminating these foods from your diet can have an extremely positive effect on your overall health, not to mention your waistline. Since I have several chronic conditions from IBS to rosacea, this seemed like a really attractive diet to adopt.
Since ‘Going Paleo’ full time seemed scary to me, I decided to wade in slowly. I’d try one meal a day – breakfast – since we all know that it is the most important meal of the day. My typical breakfast includes a bowl of cereal with almond milk, but I’m hungry again in an hour. And then in another hour. And I’m starving by lunch. So I figured hey – what have I got to lose by trying something new? Hopefully, I’ll find a new way to feel fuller longer and regulate my blood sugar to sustain my energy for the morning.
I started at the grocery store where I filled my cart with smart choices
When I got home, I began preparing a few new foods to try for breakfast. Sanfilippo has some very simple but delicious recipes in her book.
Pumpkin Pancakes
Pumpkin Cranberry Muffins
Bacon!
I hard-boiled a half-dozen eggs as well so they are ready-to-grab. My lunches for the past 3 weeks have been chicken and vegetables with an apple, so that puts me at 2 Paleo meals a day actually – yay!
I will keep you posted with updates and new recipes that I will try. Hopefully I can stick to this for a significant amount of time and begin expanding to Paleo dinner and snacks 🙂
TpT can really help you out of a jam. Are you sick? Have an unexpected absence? Looking for a new idea to spice up your unit? Have a great idea that will take you hundreds of hours, and wish someone could just do the legwork for you? TpT is the place to be! For extremely reasonable prices, you can find some amazing ideas generated by expert and veteran teachers from across the globe! If you know a teacher who hasn’t yet discovered Teacherspayteachers.com – introduce them to the teachers’ best friend!
Week 12 has come to a close, and it is time to reflect on the memorable moments and highlights.
1. Laptop Decal – This week, I’m giving a shoutout to my awesome laptop decal. All of the teachers in my school have been issued a Macbook (I have an Air). What an amazing gift! Being me, of course mine has to look different. I bought this adorable tree decal on Amazon for only about $2.50 – what a bargain!
2. Credible Sites – I posted earlier this week about how our class is investigating credible sites and learning how to do appropriate Internet searches. I added this new free product to my TpT store here. It has really improved my students’ critical thinking abilities as well as the quality of resources they are using in our Argument Paper.
3. Poms Jacket – My spirit wear arrived! I ordered a Poms jacket, with my name embroidered on it of course. I think it looks so schnazzy 🙂
4. Scarlet by Marissa Meyer – I finished my book this week. What a wild ride! I really enjoyed reading Cinder, and Scarlet was a perfect sequel. I can’t wait for Cress to be available! I think these are excellent books to recommend to adolescent readers. Meyer reinvisions the traditional fairy tales of Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood in a science fiction, futuristic setting. Cinderella is actually part cyborg (she has robotic elements to replace limbs she lost in a fire), and Scarlet falls in love with Wolf, who is part human, but part Lunar. There are elements of magic and fantasy as well. What I love most about Meyer’s writing is that while it follows the traditional fairy tales, it also departs from them in exciting and unpredictable ways – it really keeps you guessing! And the vocabulary and imagery are appropriately challenging for middle school readers. There is some violence and romance, but Meyers keeps it PG for our young readers. The Lunar Chronicles are definitely a great read!
5. Meet Ruffy – Ruffy was my grandparents’ dog. He is a 7-year-old Yorkshire Terrier. My grandmother passed away last Monday, and Ruffy needed a new home. After his 7 years of excellent lap-warming services, cuddles, and kisses, we all agreed that he needed to stay in the family and retire like a king. And so, this is the tale of how he came to live with Team Dembro. Since Ruffy was living with an elderly couple, he was not used to many things like noise, activity, or a dog-friendly schedule. He was not fully house-trained or trained at all, and he never interacted with other dogs. He cried every night for a week when we crated him, and he had many accidents in our house. But he is improving each day! He is snoring right now on my lap as I type this. He and our other dog Rocket will hopefully become very good friends, and soon Ruffy will learn to be one of the pack. We will send him to Doggy Daycare once a week to help him acclimate to other dogs, activity, and playing. I hope Grandma and Grandpa are smiling knowing that we are taking excellent care of him.
This week, as we work on our Argumentative Writing Unit, we are currently preparing to locate evidence on the Internet. Before we can find appropriate evidence, we need to learn how to determine which websites are credible and reliable.
As a pretest, I gave all of my students a handout of Google search results screenshot. I asked them which links they would click on, given our specific topic and purpose. A large percentage of the students chose the first link simply because it was the first link – not considering that the 2nd or 3rd link were actually a better fit. Then, I sent my students to a website and asked them if it was a credible website. The majority of them wrote something like, “yes, because it has good information and facts.” It was then that I knew we needed a conversation on determining the credibility of websites.
Through our class discussion, I heard the same ideas over and over again – blogs and wikipedia are bad news. I fundamentally disagree with these statements, and I have been working on deconstructing this illogic and convincing my students otherwise. Wikipedia used to be considered a highly unreliable source. However, each page now has a list of references and self-appointed curators who monitor the page. While I would not use Wikipedia as a direct source in a paper, I would use it as a starting point to familiarize myself with a topic, then follow the source/links at the bottom for more direct information. Blogs can also be reliable, if written by an expert in the field and/or if it includes credible citations and resources. UN-teaching these Internet myths has been a real challenge with my students.
Below is a list of ideas we generated as a class to decide if a website is credible. There is never a clear black/white answer. It is best to consider all of these ideas together, then make an educated guess as to whether a site is trustworthy enough to include references in your writing.
If you’d like your own copy, you can download the FREE poster here. If you have any comments on this poster – ideas for improvement, or ideas we forgot – please add your thoughts in the comments! Thanks!
Sayonara, Week 11! Below are the silver linings and highlights of the week:
1. Pizza Party! I planned a pizza party this week for the 19 gracious, patient students who took the ORCA Assessment with me and allowed me to interview them for my research. I was absolutely FLOORED when I got this letter attached to my stack of pizzas. Have you ever heard of such a kindness? A teacher ‘discount’ exists in my dreams, but NO CHARGE? Unheard of! And every single student who ate the pizza kept asking, “This is really good – where’s it from?” I’ll be a customer of Jackson’s Blue Ribbon Pub for life!
2. The Paper Chain – My book arrived! I am so stinkin’ excited to see my name in print! I worked so very long and hard on this, and it felt like Christmas when the books arrived. The hard copy isn’t available for purchase yet, but you can purchase a digital copy here.
3. Graduate Class – I recently found out I that my graduate class was approved! I am an adjunct professor for Viterbo University in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. I will be teaching a course on Children and Adolescent Literature as part of the Reading Program for obtaining a Reading License. I am very excited for this opportunity! The two required texts will be Readicide by Kelly Gallagher (my favorite teacher author!) and The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller. Excellent books!
4. More Puppy Fun – I am still doggy-sitting for my sister, who is off interviewing for dental residency programs. My dog, Rocket (left) and her dog, Tyger (right) get along like peas and carrots. Giving them a bath was just hysterical – they even put on their miserable, pitiful faces just for my amusement.
5. …WHAT?!? There is something so fundamentally wrong with this picture. Halloween and snow – ugh. Is there anything I can say / buy / do to keep the cold, wet, white stuff from off my lawn?!? Silver lining though – it is very pretty, and I enjoy watching my dog ‘rediscover’ snow each winter.
So as you may know, I do sell my lesson plans on Teachers Pay Teachers. It has been a true blessing for me and for my teaching practice. I have learned so much over the past year by meeting and collaborating with other teachers, discussing important educational topics on the forums, and learning how to create engaging and targeted lessons. I always felt that my lesson plans were solid – targeted, authentic, scaffolded, and meaningful – but I never thought to take it the extra step to make it even more engaging. On TpT I have learned the value of graphic design. Color, proportion, layout – all of these things may seem frivolous at first, but they truly are not. Students live in a visual world, and anything we can do to make materials look more authentic, professional, and inviting is worth our time.
Creating lesson plans for other teachers to use has also taught me how to be more precise and clear. I always thought, “Well, I know what I’m doing and that’s all that matters. I don’t need to write down every little thing.” It turns out that ‘writing down every little thing,’ forces one to be more reflective and introspective, possibly generating ideas or seeing a new perspective they hadn’t considered. The monetary incentive of publishing my lesson plans (and fyi – I make very little, but I have been able to make a couple payments on my student loans) and making them available to others – having the honor of impacting students beyond my own classroom – has molded me into a better teacher. Period. I love Teachers Pay Teachers!
That being said, TpT is an incredible amount of work. I estimate that I spend at least 10 hours a week, on average, developing products, learning and communicating on the forums, on Pinterest, Facebook, blogging, responding to buyers, etc. It’s a part-time job for sure, and I can see how for the very successful sellers it can become a full-time job. I am constantly thinking about how I can do things better!
I wanted to share with you a new advertising page I plan to put at the end of my products. I want teachers who purchase my products to know that I have many wonderful lesson plans and units in my store that could compliment what they are doing in the classroom. I have it organized by Adolescent Writing and Adolescent Reading, even though we all know that they go hand in hand. Most products belong in both categories, but I placed them based on the primary Common Core goals of the unit.
The hyperlinks work on the final document, so if you are interested in any of the above products, you can download the advertising page here. If you are a seller on TpT, you may want to consider adding something like this at the end of your products to let teachers know about the many other wonderful products you have available for them!
Adios, week 10! It was a difficult and LONG week, especially with WKCE State Testing, but there are always the highlights to celebrate.
1. Share Responsibly – I love seeing this Technology Poster hanging outside my room and throughout my school. I think it is wonderful that adults are realizing the role we play in modeling and guiding students to make good decisions online. How will students ever learn these skills otherwise? Well, besides the few students who have crashed, burned, and learned the hard way. We need to be proactive and provide lessons in respectful and responsible digital citizenship. Man, I never had to worry about any of this as a kid – it’s tough being a teen today!
2. Sunny Mornings – The end of Daylight Savings is actually a really sad event for me. I try very hard to shirk my season depression each year, but it is a real challenge. Right now in Wisconsin, we only get about 8-9 hours of sunlight each day. And it’s only going to get worse. I MISS SUMMER!!! Even taking the dog for a walk after I get home from work is difficult as the sunlight begins to fade. The one highlight I have (since that is what High Five For Friday is all about) is that I am enjoying seeing the sun a bit more on my way to work in the morning. This was the gorgeous view on Tuesday.
3. Letter Tiles and Highlight Strips – I’ve ordered some new materials for my reading interventions. I tell you, as an 8th grade middle school teacher, these are just not items that we normally expect to see and use in a middle school classroom, so this took some investigating to specifically pinpoint student needs. I have purchased letter tiles and highlight strips. I plan to do some phoneme-grapheme mapping with my struggling readers to help get them up to speed with phonics. I will also use the highlight strips with several students to help them focus on one line of text at a time – attention is a real issue for several students, and I think this will help (while also being somewhat private and not making the student feel ‘stupid.’). I will introduce these tools to my group next week and we will attach these foundational skills head on!!! They will catch up to speed with their peers!!
4. The Looooooong Hallway – Okay this is just silly, I know. When the students are at their Specials/Applieds classes, this is my prep time. I spend it working feverishly and running around with my head cut off, of course. But the hallways are so… empty. And long! I get a lot of walking in. My Fitbit says I walk around 5 miles a day at work. So one thing I do – I guess just to feel alive – is I close my eyes while I walk down the long hallway. I challenge myself to see how many steps I can get before opening my eyes. I’m at 15, in case you were going to ask.
5. The Dogs – While my sister is out of town interviewing for dental school residency positions, I have been dog-sitting. My dog Rocket (black and white, left side) and her dog Tyger (white, right side) get along fantastically. As you can guess, they get into a heap of trouble, too! They constantly play fight, which is awesome. It tires them both out, and they love it. In this picture, though, they are both sitting on the back of the couch, a no-no, looking so innocent. “What? We’re just chilling, watching the street for potential people/dogs/leaves/cars/etc. to bark at. Nothing to see here.” Stinkers! I love them <3
We have begun working on our Argumentation Unit – a Common Core aligned unit in which students investigate all sides of a topic, choose a side (or in my classroom, I assign stakeholders to make sure that all perspectives are represented), debate and discuss the topic as the stakeholder, come to a compromise or solution as a class, then write a final paper in which they use reasoning and evidence. This all follows the TELCon writing structure – Thesis/Topic, Evidence, Link, Concluding Sentence.
So far, we have begun by selecting 8 Controversial Topics to discuss as a class. (First, we had to even define ‘Controversial.’) For the past two days, we have been deciding which questions we might be interested in investigating as a class based on interest and researchability. We start by considering each question, one at a time. I have the students generate a ‘pro’ and ‘con’ list in their notebooks. Then, they took some time to dig around on the internet and see what kind of evidence they could locate to support either side.
The steroid question is definitely of high-interest amongst my students. However, there is an abundance of research and evidence for the ‘No’ side of the argument with very little supporting evidence on the ‘Yes’ side. For this reason, we decided to eliminate #4. My students are VERY interested in #8 (Fast-food restaurants) and #5 (Cloning). If they decided to go with the cloning topic, we will first have to define cloning and learn more about it before we can develop reasons and locate evidence.
Tomorrow, we are going to pick the one question we will pursue as a class. Then, we will generate a list of stakeholders in the argument – each student will be assigned a stakeholder role. Next, we will generate a list of questions we have about this topic as well as a list of information each stakeholder may need to locate.
I am taking them through this whole process of the Argumentation Unit using both my Argument Unit materials and The Paper Chain, an Argumentative Writing Instructional Workbook. It is very helpful to go step-by-step through this process with them. I will be sure to continue posting about our progress as a class. This is a very high-interest unit – I can’t wait for 2nd quarter to teach it every year!
