I "heart" Columbus Day! lol

I made it through conference week last week!  All of my conferences went really well.  No problems at all and I have really nice families.  I was just wiped out from all of the planning of them and everything else going on.  It just seemed like it was one thing after another when it came to school stuff that I was trying to catch up, with no success.  Then came the blessed 4-day weekend after conferences!  I got all of my papers graded Friday.  I got some more of my math games laminated and cut Saturday and Sunday I finished up another unit for TPT and TN.  Not to mention I caught up on all of my tv I was so completely behind on too and my sleep!!!  Today the plan is to update my class webpage and make another unit or 2 for TPT and TN (I hope I can do it!).  I even had time to come on here and update!  I love long weekends!!!
This week will be busy (of course) because my teammate who I share my wall with and myself, will be opening the wall for the first time to get our classes used to it.  We do Daily 5 and guided reading book clubs together so this week we will get them used to it.  We are on a review week in our LA series so we won't be meeting with book clubs.  We will start them next week.  We have used these past 6 weeks to introduce and practice Daily 5 and get that routine going.  Now this week the wall will be open they will start learning how the Daily 5 structure will work and we'll be available to help out where needed and see where there is a need for re-practicing before starting book clubs next week.  It should be fun.  We're also starting this week differentiated math groups.  The same teammate and I along with 1 of our other teammates, got together to plan out how to split our classes up to better meet the needs of our students in math.  We're new to this so it's not perfect.  Any suggestions you have are always appreciated.  We're going to teach the whole group lesson to our class first for the first 20 minutes of math and then for the remaining 40 minutes, the students were divided up into approaching, on-level, and beyond groups and they will go to one of us to get instruction and games tailored to where they're at.  I got the on-level group, which is the biggest at 28 kiddos.  We wanted to keep the approaching group little so they could really get the assistance they needed.  That meant that the other 2 groups were bigger (the beyond has 24 kiddos).  My plan as of right now is to make groups out of the 28 and meet with some of them during our time together while the rest play games to practice the skills we're working on.  For this unit it's simple because it's fact power.  I have tons of games for that.  So I'm excited to see how this works.  Telling you about this made me remember some other things I have to add to my to-do list today to get ready for the week.  I'm just so glad that I have the time to think about and work on it!!
So to share my happiness and wish you a Happy Columbus Day I'm linking up with Manic Monday by Classroom Freebies (which I haven't been able to do in a while).
This week's freebie is one that I made as part of the review unit I posted Sunday.  If you click on the picture below it will take you to my TPT store where you can click the download preview button and get my Long Vowel Go Fish game for free!  Have a Marvelous Monday!!  :)