Monday Made It!

Once again it’s time for…
This weekend I realized that a few big events are happening this week–my son’s birthday and Valentine’s Day.  Can I just tell you that shopping for 17 year old boys is REALLY hard?  Feel free to chime in with suggestions.  Seriously.
Here are a few of my Valentine made its…I wanted to do something small for my team because we are just all so doggone stressed out.  It’s just a little something–but maybe it will get everyone through the week a little easier!  While I was at it, I started to make up my valentine’s for my students–bad math jokes and all!  I just haven’t figured out yet how I want to stick their lollipops on…this project is a Monday-Almost-Made-It.

So the next little “sort of” crafty thing I did was to write a suck up note to my neighbor BEGGING for her to come take care of my cat when we take our little trip to visit Stanford in a few weeks.  She does this for us a LOT and I never feel I give her enough “pay back”.  They won’t accept money…so I thought I’d try a pre-trip bribe!
First the suck up note–written by the cat, of course.
Then the goodies…canned cat foot, treats, and new toys for HER cat–and cookies for her!  I know.  I’m pathetic.
As always, I am busy creating  for my students.  I thought I’d share one of my new products because we had SO MUCH fun with the lessons.  My students have REALLY been struggling with writing and punctuating dialogue, and I have noticed that they aren’t paying enough attention to the dialogue in the books they read…I wanted them to really see how authors use dialogue to set the mood of a story–and to learn how to write it themselves!  Check out some of the pictures and see what I mean!
Each task card gives a speaker, the person to whom they are speaking, a topic, and a “mood”…then we create dialogue to match!
We used the cards for THREE days…my students had a BLAST working together and I saw some REALLY creative work–and an improvement in punctuation!
We highlighted “dialogue tags” to check if we were punctuating correctly and using quality tags instead of “said”.
On our final day we took cards and turned them into dialogues between the two characters.  We had so much fun!
I put it all together in a resource with pictures, suggestions, and 24 task cards.  Take a peek if you are interested.  By the way…my other “made it” is that I learned how to use transparent frames that I got from Amy Alvis.  WHERE have they been all my life?  You can make frames like these with ANY digital paper behind them.  I am in love!
So anyhoo…these were some of my little projects over the last week…hope you all have a great Monday!  Don’t forget to stop by all the other great MMI posts–and make sure to leave some comments on those ideas that you were inspired by!  Just click the logo at the top of the page or HERE to get there!

Meg