WebMD's slideshow helps you understand the symptoms of lupus, an autoimmune disorder that can affect the skin, joints, and organs.

Summer is a time of reflection for me. How about you? I was reflecting today about a term I recently read about called "Toxic Behavior". Hmmm. I decided to revisit the definition of "toxic". www.toxicavengermerchdise.com TOXIC - def. 1. containing or being poisonous, 2. extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful, 3. relating to or being an asset that has lost value. Synonyms: poison, injurious, malignant, unhealthy, hurtful. Lord knows, I don't want anything to do with anything that is toxic. Is there anyone who would like to be described as having toxic behaviors? I think not. Do people with toxic behaviors exist? I believe so. Now, being honest to with myself......have I ever exhibited a toxic behavior? Yes. I mean, yes. We all have at one time or another. None of us is immune. But most people are evolved, balanced, aware, and it happens only rarely in their lives.* Toxic behaviors are damaging. They are attached to a harsh word like "toxic" for a reason. They can cause havoc and chaos within a group of people who work together. We all make mistakes. But, a person with consistent and perpetual toxic behaviors can make you want to retreat to your classroom or even find another job. Toxic behaviors damage relationships, professional success, and the well-being of the individual behaving this way, and to everyone around him or her.* * Quoted from "6 Toxic Behaviors That Push People Away: How to Recognize Them In Yourself and Change Them" by Kathy Caprino, Int'l Women's Coach, Speaker, & Writer But, let's shine the light on the darker side of the coin. Perhaps YOU are the cause of a toxic behavior. If so, know that you are doing more damage to yourself than anyone else. This is not an easy thing to reflect upon. The reality of admitting you are "the cause" of toxic behavior can be a bitter pill to swallow. But the sooner you reflect upon it, the sooner you can neutralize it. Keep this in mind: toxic behavior is negative emotional energy in motion. Whether you are the giver or receiver, it drains energy and adds stress to you and all who are affected. So what is the solution? I wish I came up with this myself, but it was listed in the comments to the original article about this topic. "Environmental pollution does harm biological life. Negative, reactive, and defensive behavior does not happen in a vacuum. The solution to achieving the right ecology is the generosity of understanding, support, and love." - Dennis Brinkley Ecology....I love it! Plant kindness. Nurture it while it grows. Water it. Shed light on it. Fertilize it. But keep in mind....pestilence will kill it.

There are a lot of benefits of being single. Whether you're someone who prefers to be in a relationship or is normally flying solo, everyone can benefit from some time on their own. And some of the benefits are pretty obvious ones. You have more…

Eighteen Angry Memes For Those With A Lot Of Pent-Up Rage - Funny memes that "GET IT" and want you to too. Get the latest funniest memes and keep up what is going on in the meme-o-sphere.

The tongue is important for your health. It’s not just a muscle that helps you chew food better. There are lots of things like helping you with communication, maintains the health of your mouth and keeps you nourished. That’s not the end. Have you noticed how the color of the tongue changes occasionally? Those are

Here you'll find the downloadable resources available on Mental Health @ Home, including mini-ebooks, safety plans, and guided journals.

A pencil sketch that was created last fall as a joke between an autistic child from Newfoundland and his mother over her kicking his toy penguin has turned into a big hit on the web.

Looking Sideways People who look to the sides a lot are nervous, lying, or distracted. However, if a person looks away from the speaker, it could display a level of comfort or indicate submissiveness. Looking askance generally means the person is distrustful or unconvinced. Looking Downwards If someone looks down at the floor a lot, […]

Our district has spent a lot of training and inservice on different ways to assess student learning. The areas that we focused on the most were Assessment FOR learning and Assessment OF Learning. I felt comfortable doing this in the classroom, but it became challenging for me to find ways... Read more

Explore pilllpat (agence eureka)'s 58919 photos on Flickr!

Are you one of the indigo adults? To find the answer to this question, you have to know the Indigo Characteristics and the 7 unique traits of indigo adults.

Get everything you need to make your habitats and organisms unit come alive! Games, videos and more!

Timeless quotes from wise people, and even some fictional characters.

Ok, just because I've been gone from 'blogging land' doesn't mean we haven't been working hard in 4B. I've definitely been documenting a lot of what we've been doing! To start, it was clear to me that our old way of peer conferencing just wasn't working. Kids seemed to be goofing around, not really helping each other, and it was a waste of everyone's time. It frustrated me when most of my one-on-one conference time was spent managing unruly PEER conferences. I knew something had to change. I decided to revamp our workshop so that our peer conferences would hold both the author and the peer more accountable AND work on our 6-traits language. I introduced our 'new' method for peer conferencing using this anchor chart to document our process. After students finish drafting, they are to grab a 6-traits peer conferencing sheet and assess themselves by circling all the descriptors for each trait that they feel match their own writing. Mind you, we did a lot of whole-class practice with scoring writing based on the 6-traits criteria so students would feel comfortable doing this process on their own (and being HONEST!). Through our mini-lessons we've learned that it's possible to have high scores in some traits but lower scores in others. That's how we grow! Here you see Devin circling where he thinks his writing falls on our 6-traits rubric. (Note: The link to the 6-traits peer conferencing sheet above will bring you to an even more updated version than the one shown in this blog posting! Just FYI!) Here's another student assessing her own writing after she's drafted. This student has finished assessing her writing using our rubric. She decides on a final number score and circles it to the left of the descriptors. Then it's time to meet with a peer. (We have a peer conference sign-up sheet in our room which helps students know which other students in the room are also ready to peer conference.) Here you see this author reading his story to his peer. After he's done reading, he will explain to his peer the scores he gave himself and why. It's important for the peer to listen carefully to the author because it will soon be her turn to assign a score to this author for each trait . On the lines on the rubric, she will write to explain the scores she gives him. The peer needs to follow the following sentence stems in his/her scoring response: * I give this a writer a ___ because... * This writer needs to work on ... This process requires peers to truly work together, hold each other accountable, and it gets the kids using our 6-traits language a lot more. The second sentence stem helps the writer establish a goal for what to work on when revising! To see more of this peer conferencing process, watch a clip of us practicing this stage! Our focus lately has been on the trait of organization. We've been looking thoroughly at different beginnings and endings of both student and published writing. Here is our anchor chart documenting what we noticed! In other Writer's Workshop news, these are a few additional anchor charts we have in our room to help keep our writing organized. This anchor chart reminds us of powerful words to use to spice up 'said'! In reading we have been working hard on purposeful talk.This is so very important to the social construction of knowledge in any classroom! It's essential to teach students purposeful talk behaviors before even considering literature discussion groups (LDGs). The majority of kids talk like...well, KIDS! So, if we expect kids to talk like mature young people about different texts they read, we need to explicitly teach them how! Talking about Text by Maria Nichols is a great place to start if you're interesting in learning more about purposeful talk behaviors. I taught each of the behaviors individually through two separate mini-lessons - one day to explain 'hearing all voices' in a concrete way (without text), and a second day to practice 'hearing all voices' using text. Then I taught 'saying something meaningful' in a concrete way without using text, and the next day we practiced 'saying something meaningful' using text , and so on. Eventually all of the purposeful talk behaviors kind of blended together and kids started to discover that we often need to use all of these things at the same time in order to truly talk purposefully about anything! We did a lot of practicing, and I've been taping students in this process. Here is a clip of students practicing their behaviors while they talk about their families. (We had read a few books about different kinds of families to foster a safe environment to celebrate the fact that we all have different kinds of families!) We also had students practice their purposeful talk behaviors while discussing their best or worst memory in school (which helped warm up their brains for a timed writing activity we did during writer's workshop). Here is a clip! As a class, we watched these video clips to analyze our body language and other purposeful talk behaviors. I think taping and analyzing is a very effective way for students to learn how they should look and sound in an LDG. 'Keeping the lines of thinking alive' is a tough concept for many youngsters. Sometimes what happens is that students take turns talking, but they don't really build on what the person before them said. In other words, they don't really DISCUSS, they just share and listen. We applauded the first group in this clip because they had good body language and were respectful as listeners, but we discovered their conversation needed to be more 'alive' by asking questions and making connections to each other's ideas and thoughts. Mrs. Pierce and I taped ourselves doing a weak LDG and a strong LDG. As we watched each example, we used dots and lines to 'map out' our conversations (see chart below). In the weak LDG, we discovered Mrs. Pierce and I shared a lot of individual thoughts. The thought started, and then it stopped. There was really no discussion about anything we said; and Mrs. Pierce wasn't even looking at me during part of our time together! How rude! ;) In the strong LDG example, we mapped out a lot of dots and lines that were connected because we took each other's ideas and built on them. We truly discussed the text to dig deeper. We introduced several conversational moves for students to use to help get their voice heard in a conversation. Students also have these conversational moves on a bookmark that they keep in their LDG books. After we learned the respectful ways to speak and act when discussing with others, it was time to teach our kids how to flag their thinking. This is a crucial step to holding a successful literature discussion group because it allows the kids to track their important thoughts while reading so they have ideas for discussion the next day. Here are the 'codes' we use to track our thinking on post-its. We encourage students to use one of our codes to categorize the kind of thought they have and then write a few words to trigger their thought. This helps them when they get into a discussion group; they'll actually have pinpointed ideas to discuss! Students kept a chart in their Thoughtful Logs with all of our codes on it for easy reference. Here's a clip of our students as they practice flagging their thinking for the first time. The next day, students put all their new learning to the test. We put them in small groups to discuss the text "Slower Than the Rest" which is a short realistic fiction story out of Cynthia Rylant's book Every Living Thing. On another day, we used a high-interest two-page non-fiction text about leeches to continue practicing flagging our thoughts. Here's a clip of our kids flagging their thinking just after we modeled it during our mini-lesson. Below are some pictures of the kids' flagged thoughts. In addition to purposeful talk, we've also been studying the historical fiction genre. We've read several mentor texts, including Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner and Dandelions by Eve Bunting. Our first round of literature discussion books are all within the historical fiction genre. Here are a few of our historical fiction LDGs hard at work: Dear Levi: Letters from the Overland Trail Scraps of Time: Abby Takes a Stand The River and the Trace (I think I put my finger over the microphone at minute 2:00!) Oftentimes, historical fiction books will have a flashback in them. One group's book, called A Scrap of Time: Abby Takes a Stand by Patricia McKissick, has a flashback that occurs towards the beginning of the story. I photocopied some of the pages to try to explain this technique during a whole class mini-lesson. In the first section of the book, three grandkids are spending time with their grandma in her attic. They find an old menu and ask their grandma why she saved it. Chapters 1 through 12 flash back to 1960, where 'grandma' is just 10-years-old, living in Nashville, Tennessee at the time of a lot of civil rights protests. The menu is from a restaurant where a lot of sit-ins took place. Through the flashback a reader learns all about life during the 1960s. In the final section of the book, a reader finds him/herself back in the present - in grandma's attic, where the three grandkids ask their grandma some questions about her life during the sixties. There was also another flashback in the story Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner. We also read The Wreck of the Zephyr by Chris VanAllsburg as an example of a flashback in a fantasy book! In other reading news, here is a picture of the anchor chart that stored all the non-fiction text features we've learned. In social studies, we've been studying the economy of the five U.S. regions. Students have been reading small sections of non-fiction leveled readers to summarize a product or industry that is important to each region's economy. Students are typing up their summaries and we're calling those summaries 'articles' as they each create a magazine of our economy. Through this project, students have learned to: * Summarize main ideas * Center and left-justify their cursor * Use the tab key to indent * Change font size, color, and style * Bold, underline, and italicize * Safe image searches * Copy and paste * Cite their picture resources Here is the inside of one student's magazine. Next week we will be using this site to create magazine covers! Lastly, we had a chance to meet with our second-grade buddies earlier this month. We split the buddies up into two groups and one group stayed with Mrs. Adams to play holiday bingo. The other group was with me in the computer lab. Buddies used this site to play a variety of math and English games. One of the most popular games to play was called 'Story Plant' where students could click on different leaves to create the beginning to a unique story. Depending on what leaves were clicked, you would get a different combination of characters, settings, problems, etc. The computer generates a beginning to a story that the kids can print off and finish during writer's workshop! Have a wonderful weekend!

A collaborative blog by Pre K and Kindergarten specialists. Child growth and development, information, free printables.

Plot is not my favorite thing to teach, or it hasn’t been in the past. However, that changed this week. I think I never liked teaching it because I felt I didn’t have a solid, engaging way of teaching the concept. Now, I have a great way of teaching it! The kids loved it, I […]

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Reading Character Wheel Freebie

These amusing illustrations were made by the talented people over at Сatsuthecat.com. A whole family from Tallinn, Estonia, works on them, and the central muse of their work is the British cat, Dita. We at Bright Side continue to be bowled over by the sheer charm of this delightful feline.

Hold This, Loudmouth - Music FAILs & WINs

Describes how the eight intelligences in Howard Gardner's MI theory, arise, develop, mature, and decline differently over the course of the human life span.

Write and decode secret spy messages with these cool secret codes for kids. Keep the kids busy making their own secret code with the free printable!

If it's hard for you to find ladyfingers or don't want to make your own, my flavorful no-cook version uses a store bought pound cake for a fast, crowd pleasing dessert you'll be proud to serve (and eat!).

Equality is humanity's Holy Grail, the cornerstone of most value systems, but we have yet to reap all of its rewards. Sure, our society has tremendously evolved for the better during the last, say, 100 years, but a long journey is still ahead, and the vast array of double standards that still divide people to this day highlight this perfectly.

No, Mom, my bisexuality is not a "youthful phase."

Is grammar outdated or still necessary for a homeschool education? Learn the pros and cons and find some great, free resources for teaching this often maligned topic.