Five for Friday, October 11, 2013

It's Friday!! Whoot! Whoot! It's time for my favorite linky party: Five for Friday. I am expounding on five random thing from my week and linking up with Doodlebugs for Five for Friday.

1. Fabulous freebies. Gotta love 'em! This past week I found a freebie for Silly Spiders that Doodlebugs posted and shared the link with the Kinder teachers at my school. I love all the great stuff on this post! It is fabulous! Check it out here!

2. I have had some troubles lately of the financial kind. Moving. Accepting a non-teaching position. Making a few silly purchases. Paying bills. So on. Ugh. It's all snowballing now. And I am overwhelmed. Spent a night in the pity pot with the lid down the other night (it might stink, but it IS warm and cozy in there).  And then I put my big girl panties back on and I started trying to do the right things. It's gonna be a long haul. That is just the way it is. I can't be cross and cranky all the time and take the good things in my life and turn them bad. So I am working on focusing on the good, doing my part, and being grateful for the good in my life. And it's really true, whatever I focus on increases. I am focused right now on doing the right thing and not spending that extra dollar or two, remembering that I am a great teacher, and digging out of this hole one step at a time. Here's the thing. Since I have started facing my fear, changing my outlook and doing the work, really neat things have started happening. I am still in dire straits financially, but I have started to discover what a wonderful place I am in when I go to work. I had some "little" gifts of joy today. I can't really share them, but I had my socks blessed off and my bucket was filled. I just cannot say it enough: I feel very loved. Here is something that made me feel this way:

a coke that just "showed up" in our order today! 

3. Students at work. My guided reading groups are becoming a joy to teach and I am seeing kids starting to "get it." Whoop! Third grade we were talking this week about inventions and the evolution of the things we take for granted today, such as electricity and the telephone, and the evolution of light.  Today we made predictions about what life will be like in 2063, fifty years from now. They wrote it in a sentence and then drew an illustration.

chairs will fly

shoes will have jet packs so we can fly

4. Allergy season is upon is? Or maybe virus season. I don't know. And I don't really care. The thing is: I have some miserable little learners. Fluency is difficult with sniffles between each word or phoneme. Ugh. It's time to keep the tissues handy.  Poor littler learners trying so hard to do reading interventions and phonics and isolate sounds and blend and.... well.... I just can hardly understand them, they are either so stuffed up or so sniffle-y.

5. Project time!! I came home to a pile of sand in my yard! This is for the patio we are gonna build while, or immediately after, we put sand and dirt under the sidewalk and fill in dirt where it has settled. I used the Punky as a comparative to show the size of the sand pile. She banged her head right before the photo, hence the ice pack to the forehead. If you remember, I posted about my need for a project and then the discovery that if we don't do something we could be dealing with a cracked sidewalk this winter. In light of my earlier pathetic sad post, I feel compelled to say, my folks are helping me with this project.  It is something we need to take care of, even if I am broke, broke, broke. We HAVE to take care of the settled dirt problem, and if we are going to pull out my strawberries anyway (boo!) and fill in with sand (see where I am going with this?), my wonderful Daddy is gonna help me stay busy working on a patio.  You all will have to stop by for some home-grilled goodness when we get it done! Or a cup of cold lemonade on the patio.