Whew...it's been a while!!!

Good Sunday afternoon, fellow bloggers!  I am gearing up for another busy middle school week.  I am an assistant coach for our middle school girls' basketball team and we begin practices tomorrow.  We have 39 girls signed up to play (total 7th and 8th graders), which is actually a manageable number compared to previous years.  Usually we start out with 55 or 60 girls and end up with around 40 who stick it out through conditioning.  For the next 9 weeks, my life will be a bit more hectic with practices and games, but it's fun to spend time with the kids outside of the classroom.

Today is Sunday, so that means it is time for my weekly TpT featured product of the week.  This week, my featured product is a fairly new addition to TpT - my Social Studies Life Application Chart.  This one-page PDF document is a chart activity to use in your social studies classroom to help make the five areas of social studies relevant to your student. Students can work individually or in small groups to answer the question, “How Does Social Studies Apply to My Life?”, for each of the five areas of social studies – geography, history, government, economics, and culture. Students are engaged in higher order thinking during this activity and it can lead to excellent classroom discussions.  We just used this in my 6th grade classroom a few weeks ago and it is a great tool to get kids making real-life application and making what I teach in social studies relevant to them.  To be linked directly to this product in my TpT store, click on the image below.

This weekend, I finally decided to jump on board the Pinterest bandwagon.  I have been reading about it on the TpT forums, as well as seeing many of my Facebook friends "pinning" items, so I thought that I would give it a try.  If you would like to check out my Pinterest, please click on my link along the left side of my blog or view it by visiting this site - https://pinterest.com/AmandaAllen82/.

Before I sign off for now, I would like to share my creative project from this week.  After seeing several of my Facebook friends' creative pumpkin carvings, paintings, etc., I was inspired to paint my own pumpkin.  So I took my college alma mater's mascot (Pittsburg State Gorillas) and painted it on a pumpkin.  Here it is!

Thanks for stopping by!  Until next time....
~Mandy   :)