A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about standardizing when I would post certain themes on my blog. For years, I’ve had Silent Sunday, Slice of Life Tuesday, and Poetry Friday as regular postings on those days. It’s been an organized and successful way for me to post and for my readers to know (at…
learning
Silent Sunday: Taking a Break from the Fringe
Today is Silent Sunday. On Sundays I post photographs of my own on a theme of my choosing. This week’s theme is a compilation of those things that relax or inspire me. I will be taking a blogging break until next Sunday to recharge and refuel. Thanks for stopping by and I’ll see you on…
Poetry Friday: Spring Has Sprung
This week I’ve been diligently working on an environmental day presentation for the first-grade classrooms at a local elementary school. Each year, I am asked back to provide a lesson for their earth day celebrations. Three of the topics I’ve presented were Forest Stewardship: Treating our Forests as our Friend, Monarch Life Cycles and Habitat,…
Student Work
As some of my faithful readers know, I’ve been going through my house and purging in order to put our house on the market later this spring and move. This month I decided to attack my home office and my beading area, as well as continue to weed out our storage area downstairs. I have…
Poetry Friday: Cardinals
In my blog post yesterday (I write daily here at The Apples in My Orchard), I wrote about a pair of cardinals that had been visiting our yard. You can check the post out here: Cardinal Story. My poem today focuses on the same pair of birds, just put into a poem. Cardinal Story: A…
Maybe the End of an Era?
Yesterday, I did something that I’ve been putting off. If you read my blog regularly, you know we’ve been cleaning out in anticipation of moving later this year. Sometimes cleaning out is easy. You look at something and think, why did I keep that piece of sh_t? Or, sometimes cleaning out is hard. We all…
Buying Books and Independent Bookstores
Lately, I need to be reading an enjoyable book. It provides me a few minutes of downtime during busy days and a few minutes to wind down at the end of the day, as well. I’ve always been a reader but during the years I had a demanding career as well as the time we…
Holiday Cactus Resource on TpT
Few probably know that I have some classroom resources on the Teachers Pay Teachers website. My user name there is Garden Club Lessons. I taught an after-school garden club for 13 years at the elementary school my boys attended. For the most part, I researched topics and then developed my own lessons. It’s not anywhere…
Poetry Friday: Poems Borne of Experience
Ten years ago, during the summer of 2011, my eldest son participated in the National History Day contest with a friend. Let me be clear, they were in the national part of the contest. This meant that they had participated at the district level, the regional level, the state level, and were selected to go…
National Park Flora & Fauna
We did not see much wildlife in the national parks. Exceptions were elk grazing as we entered the Grand Canyon, causing a flurry of cars to pull off the road to watch these giants eat. While at the Grand Canyon we also saw Pinon Jaybirds and lots of ravens. A tarantula was spotted by the…