Basketball or Bust!

Never did I expect to become a Basketball Mom to two daughters, Wife of the BB Coach, or Friends with Professional Basketball players….but I am and I love it!

Oldest Daughter plays Varsity BB for her High School. Sweet Husband is the Coach and loves it. Youngest Daughter is a top player in the Youth League and will play JV next year in HS.Low and behold….we had an opportunity to meet Celeste and Sidney, two of the absolute nicest, warmest, sweetest professional women basketball players. They are from the USA and are playing here on the number one team here in Belgium. They have adopted our HS team and have come to help out with practices, sending encouraging text messages before, during, and after games.  They out did themselves by sending a super funny short video to the team when they were in Germany playing for  the European Championship.  FYI – our team came in 3rd out of 16 which was very exciting since most folks thought we might not make it to the finals. Yahoo for everyone. Thank goodness we still have March Madness to enjoy as we slowing wind down from Basketball Mania in the Masion de Mitchell.

"Cuz I Just Know"...is not an option!

Citing Text Evidence. I love it with a big puffy teacher heart. The students, not so much. It is so much easier to be lazy and just write “cuz I just know”.  Well, that does not fly on in Room 208, on the Terra Nova, and most certainly not in 7th grade which is just a blink away.

Escape from Alcatraz was a great first article to work on. I firmly believe that it is my responsibility to make the reading interesting and informative. I have to meet my learners half way, so I am always searching for new articles, reading and publications.

After a few too many activities which required the reader / writers to Cite Text Evidence, I do believe they have it down. Lots of scaffolding, cheat sheets, anchor charts, quiet at the desk conferences with encouragement, classroom sharing (without raising hands!), and way too much grading. 

But it was all worth it. We will finally wrap this up by Friday….just in time for a WEEK OFF! We have a full week off because we follow the International School calendar and they get it off for Pre-Lent / Carnival! Off to London, basketball games, sleeping in, and a few lazy days. Oh, and Oldest Daughter studying for the ACT / SAT. Can’t be all fun and games!

Belle

Picture the day… rainy Sunday, too many papers to grade, too much homework for our daughters, lazing around and enjoying every second of it. On our door step was a dog…well, I thought it was a dog. What a mess. Wet, stinky, dirty, scared mess. I did the only thing I could think of…. Brought her inside, dried her off, gave her a bath and dried her again.  Loads of promises that we would not keep her but just get her a haircut so we could help rehome her. Well, we all know how that ends up.

Meet Belle, our newest addition to the family. Ben is still the King of the house but he sure does like her.

BEFORE.                                                                           NOW......

  

Oooopps....I'm back!

Oh My Gosh..how time flies when we are busy teaching, living, planning, friending, praying, and breathing! So much has happened since my last post way back in November. I am not going to blog about each one so here are the highlights: Big 50 party for my sweetie husband. It was a huge success. Youngest daughter is officially 14 and I have no idea when that happened. BFF was notified that she is cancer free…an impromptu party broke out at my house within 30 mins of all of close friends hearing the news. Christmas was wonderful as always.

In class we have been busy, busy, busy. Love Erin at Lovin’ Lit Interactive Notebooks. I use them to jump start the unit, add in some snazzy PowerPoints (love PPT, Prezi’s make me dizzy beyond belief!), added some higher level activities and off we go. Our Poetry unit went off uch better than I expected and the students all enjoyed the Pick a Song and Tell us All about It activity. They identified the Figurative language, the rhyming, the approximate rhymes, allusion, alliteration, and all the rest.

As you can imagine, there were about another 104 topics and events since November but we will leave it at that so I can consider myself caught up and back in blogger land!