Monday Made It: July 7th

I love being productive over the summer.  It's the perfect time to catch up on some things and to try new things.  Here's what I was able to get done this week:

 I've decided that I need to cook more and eat healthy.  I pin a ton of recipes on Pinterest, but haven't made anything....yet.  This week I made Slow Cooker Taco Chicken Bowls.  Here's the pin:

Here's how mine turned out:

It's not as visually appealing as the pin, but it tasted great!  My daughter is not a fan of rice so I put hers on tortilla chips and she loved it.  It was delicious on the chips so I might turn this into a chicken taco nacho recipe!

 To go along with my goal of cooking more, I thought of all of the things that I know how to cook and my family enjoys and made a 4-week calendar.  Now this is not set in stone, but I wanted to get things on paper and have it organized by type of food to make sure we're eating a variety of foods.

My goal with this is to plan out a 4-week rotation that I can pick and choose from depending on the week.  Hopefully this will keep me on track!

Along the organizational front, I finally put together my blog organizer.  Last summer I made an organizer but I never really used it.  I didn't like the set up of the pages.  When I saw that Ashley from Schroeder Shenanigans in 2nd had made an organizer I snatched it up.  I picked up a 1/2" binder and put it together:

 I printed one of the covers from the file and put it in the clear view front.

 Instead of using dividers, I used Post-It tabs that I had on hand to make my sections.

 The first section I have is the calendar section.  I have the rest of the year printed up.

Next I have the week at a glance type of page to jot down quick post ideas.  I love this pack because it has so many types of pages.  I'm loving the product pages to get my ideas for future products on paper and thoroughly plan them out.  You can check out this fabulous organizer in Ashley's TPT store.

Have you read this book?  One of the co-authors Dr. Gravity Goldberg was a keynote speaker at a Balanced Literacy training I went to a few weeks ago.  Both authors worked and trained with Lucy Calkins at the Teachers' College Reading and Writing Project.  This book is a fabulous read and really opened my eyes to all that conferring can and should be in my classroom.  While reading this, I knew that I needed to step up my conferences in all subjects, so I created Conferring Notes: Tools to organize and plan for instruction.

 This product has pdf and editable forms you can use to record your conferences.  I've also included labels that can be used during small group instruction to note progress.  I plan to use the forms to create a conferring binder that will house all of this important data.