Five for Friday...China, Top 25, Clip Art, Erin Condren and Visualization

Yippee!  It's Friday and jeans day and pay day and a two-hour delay day!!  It doesn't get much better than that, at least in the teacher world that is.  And of course I'm linking up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching for her weekly Five for Friday linky.

1. I'm going to China!  I found out today that I will be one of ten teachers from my school that will be traveling to China in July to teach a two week summer school program.  We get to plan our curriculum so I can guarantee that I will be taking some of the great products that I've found at TpT/TN with me.

2. I received and email today from Top Masters in Education that my blog was selected as one of the Top 25 Elementary Blogs of 2012!  I am beyond excited!  A year ago at this time I didn't even know that the teacher blog world was even out there.  It wasn't until a boring day during Spring Break that Pinterest introduced me to all these wonderful resources.  Life is good!

3. I learned how to make my own clip art!  I bought the app Art Studio for my iPad, a stylus and voilà.  What do you think?  I using them in a product that I'm working on and hoping to list before the big sale this weekend.  Here's a sneak preview...

4. I've been wanting to order an Erin Condren notepad to go with my planner for quite a while.  I found this promo code on Facebook today and was able to get the notepad for free!  I just had to pay the shipping!!  Click on the picture to look at all of her great products.

5. Don't you love it when you have a break through in your classroom?!  I have several students that tell me they don't see pictures in their heads while they're reading.  Tragic!  I can't imagine being mental image free while reading a good book.  It just so happens that these are also my students that don't have a love for reading.  Last week I decided that I really needed to work on visualization during guided reading.  I came up with the idea of taking short passages from great chapter books and putting them on cards.  I read the passages to students and had them draw what they saw on paper.  It was so interesting to see all the different images!  Sure enough, the students who claimed to be image free had the less detailed drawings.  We've been working on these all week and today one of my students came up to me after independent reading and said the magic words, "Mrs. V. I saw pictures in my head when I was reading and they were even in color!"  Whooo Hooo!!  Here are a few pictures of the Visualization Jar that I made and one of their cute mental images.  You can see the preview at my TpT store or TN store.

If you're still with me, thanks for reading my Five for Friday!!