Monday Meet Me

I just found The Teaching Tribune's Monday Meet Me and love it! I love finding new blogs to follow and let's get real here people, everyone loves a linky party.  

I teach 6th Grade science and social studies in Peoria, Arizona and I just love this grade level. The kids understand wit and humor, but let's face it, are still babies. I know some people are horrified of teaching middle school, but the students are really just tall kindergarteners.  To be perfectly honest, I admire lower grade teachers SO much because I could never do that! I always picture cat herding in my head; you all are so patient to teach the wee ones.  

I have two chihuahua mixes that we rescued from the animal shelter. It's funny because I am actually not that fond of the chihuahua breed, but there are so many unwanted little chihuahuas here in Phoenix we just had to do it. They are our little sugar plums! :)

I watch way more TV than I would like. Please don't picture me as this couch potato that sits and watches TV all day with bits of Cheetos stuck in my greasy hair. It's not that bad, just more than I would like. Half the time it's just background noise for me, but I am going to try this summer to cut it down. 

We purchased a record player a year ago and we have absolutely love having it. I like to play records when we are cooking, eating dinner, or just hanging around at home. My husband and I also love to have day dates where we go record hunting in antique/thrift stores so it's become our "thing". 

The others are pretty self explanatory. :)  I can't wait to meet some of you via this linky party! 

Snapshots from the Week

This week I headed to Austin to help out my parents. My sweet mama landed herself in the hospital so I have been trying to assist wherever I can.  I can't even begin to tell you how scary it is to have someone who you love in the hospital, but I am sure everyone reading this knows how that feels.  Life is such a precious gift and I think it takes instances like this to realize how blessed we are.  Since I left from home in kind of a rush, I don't have anything to participate for Monday Made It.  I thought I would share some random snapshots from my week. I do miss my 365 Project that I had started earlier this year. I wish I could start that up again, but that seems a little odd if I am missing a good 60 days haha!  It's a rainy, snuggly day here in Austin. :)

Electricity Unit Resources

Don't you just love when you find resources in the most unlikely of places?

If you teach 4th or 6th grade (and really any other grade level where you teach electricity), these will be like gold to you! APS (Arizona Public Service) is an electricity company here in Arizona and they have created these great informative power points about renewable and non-renewable energy that I have used in my classroom.  

Unfortunately I can't find where these great power points are sourced from since the links seems to be broken, but this is where they were originally downloaded from. 

What I love about these is that they have notes with additional information so that you can learn more and it also sometimes adds in activities that you can do as well. 

APS has power points for...

SUSTAINABILITY

ELECTRICITY

WIND

SOLAR

HYDROPOWER

GEOTHERMAL

BIOMASS

Just click on the pictures or titles to download. Even though they look the same because they have the same introductory title slide, they are all different and fabulous. I hope you enjoy! 

Tucson Day Trip

I love taking day trips! Here in Arizona we have so many wonderful places to visit. I have only been to Tucson once and it was just to accompany George when he worked a night shift. So we got there around 10:00 pm, I slept in the hotel room while he worked, and then we left the following morning. Needless to say there wasn't much seeing of the sights!

There are so many things to do in Tucson so it was hard to narrow down what we wanted to do.  There are still so many things I want to see so we will have to do another trip soon.

The first thing we did was go to Biosphere 2.

It was AMAZING!  The Biosphere was part of a project in the 90's where scientists lived and researched for a few years inside of this air sealed bubble with different ecosystems. It includes 4 different ecosystems for research - the rainforest, the savanna, the ocean, and the fog desert. It was so cool to be able to experience these different climates and it was like we traveled all around the world in less than an hour.

The other really cool part was just to see the engineering genius that went behind this - between the cooling and heated water to control climate to the "lungs" of the Biosphere to control pressure, it all was so interesting.

After our Biosphere adventure we were starving and needed some food. Thank goodness for Yelp we found this random place to eat lunch. It was called Wings and Rice and you guys - it is seriously good. Whoever thought of the crazy combination between hot wings and fried rice was a food genius!  Seriously unhealthy, but I like to think I burned a lot of calories at our Biosphere wondrousness.

After lunch, we headed to the Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures. Seriously, that's its name. It was full of alllllllll miniature things.  I don't think you can quite grasp this. So many many many dollhouses. It was a little overwhelming and got old after a while, but that didn't mean I couldn't take many pictures for your viewing pleasure. :)  Get ready for photo overload...

I think it was about at this point that my husband turned to me and said "I just can't look at another miniature thing, Heather."  Since he was such a good sport about the whole thing we left promptly after that. It's just hard to believe that these are all dollhouses. I wish they were adult sized! I'd be fancy schmancy. 

Have you ever visited Tucson? What are some other must sees for our next trip there?

Monday Made It - Adorable Bell Work Templates

It's the first Monday Made It for the summer!  I had a little bit of "teacher's block" with this one, but I dug up some old goodies and revamped them.

Whether or not you teach a grade level that has bell work, you can use these cute power point slides as part of your morning message or morning work.  I usually had my students answer two questions at the beginning of the class. They usually reviewed previous information or had them apply the information. Sometimes I would throw in personal reflection questions to support our behavior program, Capturing Kids' Hearts.

All you have to do is download the slides! None of them are PDF so you can easily just insert a text box to adjust them to fit your needs. Here's an example of how I used one.

I hope you are able to use some of these! To download just click the picture. Enjoy!  See a template for these beauties towards the bottom.

Science themed bell work or morning message template

Generic template for morning or switching classes - forms are just anything to turn in but like I said before, change it if it doesn't suit your needs!

Another one you can use for switching classes if needed.

Insert text on the white label.

Love this one - it's definitely my favorite and made for a math classroom. Word to the wise, if you don't have LD Shelly Script font downloaded the cute cursive won't show up. You can download it here.

Bright and cheery!

Here's a template that I photocopied for my students at the beginning of every week. All I would do then was duplicate the slide and add in my new questions and click save at the end so by the end I had a whole quarter of bell works saved up for the following year. Super easy and efficient!  Because I taught two classes but did so three days in a row (science for three days, social studies for three days, repeat) that is why I have the subject line.  I have uploaded it to Google Docs as a Microsoft Word document so you can edit it to suit your needs. :)  Click the picture below to download.

Remember to link up with Tara at Fourth Grade Frolics to show off your Monday Made It!