Pre-Christmas Activities

This year, I'm teaching EIP (early intervention program) Reading students for half of the day and gifted students for the other half. I love working with all different ages and really like the variety of teaching struggling readers and gifted students. But the highlights of my day are definitely when I'm reading with my kindergarten and first grade kiddos.

 This is a sweet note I got from one of my first graders who exited my reading group this past week after scoring way too high on his reading assessment to continue coming to our group! We didn't so much work on spelling. ;)

Thanks to the incredibly generous Christmas gifts from my students, Matt and I went on a gift-card-spending SPREE over the weekend! We kicked it off Friday night with a dinner date at Season's 52 (yes, I got a $50 gift card from one of my kids!). Then Saturday, we had lunch at Farm Burger, browsed through Barnes and Noble, and then went to see Silver Lining's Playbook. We had a ton of fun and didn't spend a penny!

On Sunday, we met up with some high school friends who were in town for the holidays- for cosmic bowling. Nothing says Merry Christmas like cosmic bowling at 1:30 on a Sunday afternoon. Haha, but really- it was so fun to catch up with everyone! I'm pretty sure the guys bowled 4 games to our 1.5- but we had fun talking!

Sunday night, we attempted to make a ginger bread house. I decided about 2 minutes in that ginger-bread-house-building falls into the "craft" category for me. 

Crafts and I do not get along. 

It was actually pretty comical to see both of our personalities come out. 

Right off the bat, I started tearing everything open and placing the pieces in the spots where I thought they should go while Matt read the directions. :) 

Those first 2 minutes were a snapshot of our marriage- me being the more impulsive, slightly impatient one and Matt being the ever-careful double-checker.

We balance each other out. ;)

Oh yeah, and I cut a huge corner out the icing bag, which isn't entirely conducive to detail work on the roof, but Matt managed quite well. I "caulked" the main pieces together and stayed away from this part.

Seems like they should have equal numbers of colors in those bags so that if one was wanting to create a pattern with the colors, one could.

Not too shabby, huh?!

Merry Christmas!!!