trash bags full

we just finished our christmas party, and this is my favorite time of the year! we usually get to fill 2 trash bags full of of gifts from our students, the students of our co-teachers, and students from the past. it's a virtual mountain load of gifts! and when christmas eve comes around, when we get to open our presents, my family gets to watch with envy as i open 90% of all the gifts under our tree. they're all mine!

listen up

it's christmas time again, and my kids are as excited as bees on prozac. i can hardly make them sit still and listen, so to keep our stress levels down to a more manageable level, my co-teacher and i decided to have a series of workshops to help the kids remember their reading lessons. we're now reading consonant - vowel blends. as in ba - bag, be - bed, and the like.
some kids find this activity so frustrating. for starters, they have to master the individual sounds of the letters. then they have to put a consonant and a vowel together. then, they associate it with a picture. imagine, 3 concepts in 1! to make up for this, some parents try to cheat. they drill their daughters to memorize what the blends sound like, and to put it together with a picture. but they forget, we READ, not LISTEN. their daughters do well on the oral assessments, but fail in the written part. then they wonder why. maybe parents should be the ones drinking all those infant formulas to develop the brain.