Whirlwind!

Ever feel like life passes so quickly that when you turn around a year's gone by?  I gotta tell ya, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and maybe I should go ahead and say Happy Presidents' Day, MLK, Jr. Day, and Valentine's Day, too!

Just before school was out, we finished up my Auntie Claus unit, and our class won the school door-decorating contest with our Auntie Claus door & hallway space.

Our little corner of the world...

Auntie's North Pole

Auntie's NYC penthouse

Close up of Auntie

Close up of Santa Moon

You might remember that we were planning a surprise Disney trip for my sweet girls for Christmas...so my husband decided we should leave that day!  Whoa!  Back up the bus - I wasn't ready!  First, I'd missed the last day before school was out with Clare running a fever.  Then Callie got back in on the act and had a bad sinus infection that she shared with Brady.  I was so crazy taking care of all the sickies that I baked not one cookie, sent not one card, shopped on the 23rd (only), made up a scavenger hunt for the Disney tickets at midnight on the 24th, and never looked back.  You could tell when we got back home and saw the post-cleaning-ladies nightmare of a mess we left everywhere!

Cinderella's Castle lit by laser to look like a gingerbread castle!

We did have a fabulous time, and by New Year's Eve, everyone was well, except Brady, who's still sick.  I took my laptop, but never even took it out of the suitcase, which I'm pretty proud of, since last year's resolution was to be a better mother and wife...um, still workin' on that.  This year, my top resolution is to MMOB (mind my own business - or at least keep my mouth shut, whenever possible!), followed closely by sticking with Weight Watchers & adding exercise (ugh - I HATE sweat!), because that 54 pounds in the trash (or wherever lost weight goes) is lookin' pretty good, but 50 more would be WAY, way better!

We started back to school Thursday, oddly - I wasn't sure what to do with only 2 days - but we thought a lot about resolutions, reviewed our class rules, and talked about how to be better bucket fillers.  I made a mini-unit for my sweeties to use to really think about what New Years Resolutions were, how they came to be a tradition, and what they might want to work toward in 2013.

The mini-unit comes with both versions - the cute kiddos, and the Hoo-Ray owls, and you can pick it up on Teachers Pay Teachers by clicking on the large picture above.  It's lasting us more than two days, but I'm flexible like that, and I want my babies to think hard before making some random promises to themselves about 2013.

Here...some final copies of New Years' resolutions...

 I'm working on a Measurement Mega Unit, that should be ready by next week.  I'm starting it on Monday, but it covers all the second grade CCSS standards, so I'm not quite finished with the last bit yet.  Be looking for that to come soon (I hope!)  It's super-cute, and winter/snow themed...we can dream down here in S.C.!

We'll also be starting to learn about matter Monday, and I love how all the winter math ties in with the fun water experiments I have planned for studying changes in matter, so I'm just going all out and reading Snow Day, The Wild Toboggan Ride, Snowmen at Night, and lots of other wintry tales, while we learn to infer characters' feelings, authors' purposes, and unfamiliar word meanings.  I found a fab you tube video of a small group lesson on making inferences, and pinned it to my "It's Elementary, My Dear" board on Pinterest.  You can click here to find the pin about half-way down the page.

I hope this year finds you peaceful, well, rested, and happy!  Thank you for all your loyal reading in 2012 - I'll do my best to write more often in 2013.

Brooke