'Bout Time!

Geez! It's been almost a year since my last post...not good. Oh well, I'm going to chalk it up to working full time for the first time in at least 5 years and being a mother to a 3 and 4 year old. The good news is that all my hard work will pay off in the form of some personal time next year (fingers crossed) since I've got a rough outline of a pacing guide put together. No more reinventing the wheel for me!

Things I am excited about:

1. I just finished presenting at a week-long NGSS summer institute put on by the California Science Project. I really enjoyed talking about interactive notebooks and their benefits to science education (actually any form of education, for that matter). I got to work with some of the most amazing people; it'll definitely go down in history as an amazing experience. 
2. While in the the NGSS institute, one of the teachers shared a site that she uses in her class. The site is called Newsela and it is awesome. It is a collection of current, relevant, and interesting articles in any content area for students to read. You can select an article and either print it off in 5 different Lexile reading levels or assign it to students according to their reading level  online using the online class feature. I'm super excited about this and can't wait to use it in my classes next year. I see it being particularly useful when we conduct Socratic Seminars.  
3. My best friend is now our district's literacy coach. I can't wait to work with her in developing strategies to build science literacy as well as encourage dialogue within my science classroom. 

I still have a while until school starts, but it's nice to have some things to look forward to.