Sunday night Blahs!

 I hate feeling "blah"...but this is how I have been feeling since the first day of school.  Our school implemented a new schedule this year---and I just can't quite get into the swing of things.  Two days a week my students are in "specials" for 90 minutes (back to back--for a 90 minute block), one day a week they have NO breaks other than lunch...but I will try to be a POSITIVE Polly, not a NEGATIVE Nellie (which is what I told my principal too).  Anyhoo---because of this new schedule, and with it making me blah--I feel pressed for time, and struggle with getting things accomplished in my school day--and well--my brain doesn't work real well after hours lol.  So here I was today---baking in the kitchen (man does that relax my mind)--making oreo cupcakes to take into my WONDERFUL coworkers tomorrow.....when I started thinking about centers.  I'm telling ya--baking clears my mind--and well, we won't talk about what it does to the mid-section---but my mind is thinking much clearer now---That's the important thing! :) Okay--anyways--Last week my centers must have been too difficult for my students....so I tried to make them simpler for next week.  Our Envisions math lessons have been on adding numbers---with "number" and "number" is "number"..I introduced how to take that information and plug it into an addition sentence to make the following lessons go a little more smoothly. So I made this activity tonight.  It's very similar to the domino addition you can find on my blog. Also, if you read how I run my centers, you know that I don't have a lot of workstations out at a time.  I find this more manageable for me, and the students are happy with it too.  Therefore, I only have to create 2 new stations a week.  My other station this week is going to be about Fall.  We read a story about fall Friday.  They really enjoyed it.  I am going to write a poem on chart paper, write it on sentence strips and have them sequence it.  Then they will have one to color and take home to practice reading.  They will also illustrate and write about why they like fall.  I have made Autumn word cards to help with spelling, and there's a journal page as well.  You can get all those goodies here.  Here is a simple journal page as well.

Have a great week blogger friends!!!  Hopefully for me these blahs will disappear-- or I'm going to need a LOT of you to visit Ohio and take home goody trays (as I will be busy clearing my head as I bake) ;)


**I have noticed that some of the cute fonts I use don't carry over into google docs.  I apologize for that.  The one I used for the math center was PC Thick Dots.  I don't think it is showing up that way.