Weekly Wrap-up for February 26, 2012: Playing Catch-up and Teaching Texts.

I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea that this month is almost gone. While I haven't been busy doing too many things, I still feel like I am far behind on getting anything accomplished. I guess I will reevaluate that when I get to March 1, right?

I ended up going to see a movie with my mom on Thursday night, which we haven't done in a long time! We went and saw One for the Money, based on the Stephanie Plum series. I read the first ten a real long time ago, and my mom, I think, it caught up on the series, so it was fun to see the movie. It was definitely a good choice-funny with cute guys-and we had a good time.

On Friday, our district had a snow day. We were supposed to get 8+ inches of snow. We got maybe 1. But, Matt had the day off, so we took advantage of it and went to see an early movie. We figured that by going early, we would miss a lot of the crowd (the movie was at 4:30), but we walked into a theater that happened to have a large group of my old students. They all said hi, stared at Matt a bit, and made it that much more fun. :) We saw Wanderlust, which was a little more...extreme than I had planned on (don't get me wrong, it was funny, but a little over the top in regards to the humor). After, we hit up a local seafood place for dinner. It was a good date night and we both needed it, since we never go out anymore.

I've also been doing a lot of reading this week. I knew I had my third Roots post to read for, but I swore not to touch the book until I finished David Copperfield. I managed to finish it Tuesday so I could read Roots all day Wednesday. I finished both books, which was exciting since it doubled my monthly book number. :)

So while I managed to read a lot this week, I didn't read as much as I wanted to. I would have liked to be done with a few more titles (maybe a challenge book or two), but I can't help it that the chunky books are calling to me. My next read is Nicholas Nickleby, so I suppose I just do these things to myself, right? I doubt I will finish Nicholas Nickleby by the end of the month like I want to, but hopefully I can hit the halfway point.

The only other exciting thing to happen this month was my meeting to learn more about my long-term placement on Thursday morning. I'm starting on the 5th, just over a week away, and I will be there until the end of the school year. I'm really excited to get back into it, especially because of all the wonderful books pictured below:

The only two books that are new to me are The Color of Water and Alas, Babylon. I don't know much about either, so if you've read them, please give me some pointers. I do think Alas, Babylon will fit into Adam's Challenge for March, so I'm glad it will serve double duty.

I've read everything else at least once. I probably won't read The Crucible again until we're reading it in class since I am fairly familiar with it (so excited to teach it again), but I want to read through everything else before we get to it in class. Two of the classes are in the middle of two books, Night and Kindred, so I have to finish up the units on each. I'm planning on reading both this week (I read Kindred when I was a high schooler and Night a few years ago).

And can I tell you how stoked I am to teach Ender's Game and The Hunger Games? Card's novel got me hooked on science-fiction, so I have a soft spot for it. And The Hunger Games is just going to be fun. :) They just bought the books and no one has used them yet, so I can't wait to develop a unit for the book. I'm going to be reading that one with the class for the non-readers, so it should be a fun time.

So, my last week before teaching is going to be full of reading, don't you think? In addition to making some good progress with the Dickens title, I need to get through those other two titles. We'll see how that goes. :)

Well, I am spending the rest of my morning and afternoon reading, writing, and doing a little lesson-planning.

Hope you all have a happy reading week!