Currently November

Mamma Mia, it's already November!  My poor, poor, neglected blog.  Another challenging year, another challenging class, and not a lot of time leftover for my sweet little blog.  The good news is that I am trying lots of new things in my classroom this year; I just haven't left myself much time to blog about them.

Anyway, I'm stopping by to link up with Farley for Currently November and pay a small homage to my favorite holiday month.  

Listening: As a present to myself, I took Amazon up on their kind offer to try a month of Prime for free.  Prior to that though, I made an order for some school things, and needed to get my total up to $35 so I could get free shipping.  So I indulged my guilty pleasure and purchased the 4th season of Rookie Blue.  SO GOOD!!!

Loving: I'm taking my dad up to OU next weekend to watch the OU/Baylor game.  SO excited!!!  Boomer Sooner!!!

Thinking: Don't they all?  I'm all for being social and enjoying myself, but I also put a lot of pressure on myself to get some schoolwork done (grading lesson plans, etc.).  Having just finished fall conferences and the first round of report cards, I could really go for a weekend of sitting at home and doing nothing.  Can anyone relate?  

Wanting: Even though it kind of bugs me that the Christmas Mania starts before Halloween has even come and gone, I can ALWAYS go for a peppermint mocha from Starbucks.  Plus, they built a new location a few months ago that's on my way to work.  Love it!!!

Needing: About a week ago, the middle of my back on the righthand side started hurting.  I didn't do anything to aggravate it, and it pretty much throbs all the time, despite my preventative Tylenol regimen that I'm on (see above about the challenging year.  Note also that the regimen includes previously unheard of amounts of caffeine for me.)  If anyone has any advice/stretches for me, let me know.

Reading: Not much right now, since school and my social weekends are keeping me busy, but I'm in the middle of: 

Reading for Fun (If you haven't read Me Before You, you SHOULD (even though it's a bit of a bummer, it's really good).)

AND

Reading for Professional Growth.  Next Up: Building Mathematical Comprehension, also by Laney Sammons)

My current classroom challenge (other than differentiating everything for everyone due to the wide range of ability/readiness levels in my classroom) is vocabulary instruction for learners that are really struggling.  So that's up next for my research.  Anybody have any tried and true tricks?  

Thanks for reading!  I'm off to watch more delightfully crummy TV and grade papers while icing my back.  :-)