Good morning! Well…almost afternoon since I was catching up on some much-needed sleep. I slept in until 9 today which is pretty rare for me to do, but also much needed since I haven’t really had much down time since I got back from Hawaii.

Today will be a nice change of pace. I’m going to make a quick gym appearance and then will be heading over to Los Banos with Veronica for a barbecue at her sister’s place. I definitely need this down time to re-energize myself for this next week.

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Yesterday was another day of professional development (PD). I really appreciate that they make sure that the sessions we attend are actually PD and not just information sharing. I used to get really frustrated when we would get together as a staff for PD, but in reality, they were just announcements and information that we could have read in an e-mail. There’s nothing worse than sitting through something like that knowing you have so much you could be working on.

We attended a Jolly Phonics Training Workshop, which I’m pretty excited about. I won’t be using this as an intervention tool, but the K-1 classrooms will be using this so it’s important that I understand how they introduce letter sounds and digraph sounds in the classrooms.

After the session, Jen and I went over to Erik’s Deli for a quick bite. So, so good.

After lunch, we went to our respective school sites. Our school site, however, is under construction for the summer because we are expanding by two grade levels. So we are doing our PD at Rocketship Los Suenos for the first two weeks. Today was the first day we got some flex time to really dive into our action items and develop a plan for the start of the school year. It’s a bit overwhelming to have so much running through my head, so it was nice to be able to sit down and write out a list of things that need to get done.

After work, a bunch of us went up to Redwood City to go to Gourmet Haus Staudt which is a beer garden that Julia LOVES. I’m not a huge fan of beer so I was probably the only one in the entire place to order a glass of their cabernet. Which was still surprisingly good. We also got some snacks for the table. The giant pretzels are pretty dangerous.

After we left the beer garden, I made up a game for our group to play. It was inspired by this:

Now, I will be the first person to tell you that I am addicted to my phone. Social media sites, text messaging, WhatsApping with my family. I’m a relationships-oriented person and I need to feel connected to everyone and everything. However, I think in my attempt to feel connected to everyone and everything, I start losing the connection with the present moment and with the people I am spending time with.

So, we played a game. Everyone dumped their cell phones into my purse. And the first person that grabbed their cell phone from my bag had to buy everyone else a drink. It didn’t last too long because we eventually had to part ways when we drove down to Mountain View, but it was a fun little game that I’m going to start using all.the.time. It makes the present moment so much more enjoyable to be distraction-free. 🙂

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Let’s chat: 

How do you keep yourself from getting TOO distracted from your phone/social media sites/blog-reading?