Top 10 Award! and Medallions update

Kaleigh at Kaleigh's Klassroom has given me the

This made my day! If you haven't stopped by her blog yet, you definitely should. She's got so many great ideas. I love her latest St. Patrick's Math Stations freebie.  Be sure to check it out.

The Top 10 award was designed to encourage teachers who blog. There are 10 other bloggers I'm passing the award on to. If you haven't checked them out, please do. They're so creative!

http://misswteaches.blogspot.com

In addition,
Trisha at First Grade Frosting was so sweet also and gave me the 

This award is supposed to be passed on to 15 other bloggers. I hope it might be okay if instead of listing 15 more blogs,  I encourage you to check out all the blogs in my sidebar. I enjoy looking at these lovely blogs every day.
Thank you to everyone who stops by my blog. I feel such support from your comments and reading your blogs. This teacher blog community is exciting and inspiring to be a part of.


As for my Medallions update....

 our staff development day today was good and "ugh!" We did Write From the Beginning refresher stuff this morning. Our trainer was upbeat and has high expectations for writing. She got me jazzed about the program, which I haven't been in the years we've had it. But the Medallions part was "ugh". It turns out that it's the update for Houghton Mifflin reading only in California. It was designed to meet the state requirements for more fluency and vocabulary instruction. It uses the same anthologies and phonics library stories to save money compared to a whole new adoption. Personally I think the vocab component could be good. It has mini-big books (weird, huh? But they're bigger than a regular book an smaller than the usual big book. So I came up with mini-big book). These have a story like the read alouds and a picture to launch a week of vocab lessons. The fluency component isn't much in my opinion. It also comes with stuff for reading groups and independent centers, but I don't care for those much. Think I'll stick to Daily 5 for that part. But it dropped "Universal Access" and goes back to the idea of reading groups which they call "Differentiated Instruction." It was interesting but I left feeling overloaded. A few hours have gone by and I'm feeling better about it now.

Boy, this was a long post as it turns out. Thanks for sticking with me. Hope you have a wonderful weekend!
 Chrissy