Looking Ahead and Reflecting Back

Well, here it is, New Year's Eve, and I'm enjoying being home where it's quiet and I can do one of my very favorite activities:  blogging!  What better way to celebrate than to join not one, but two linky parties!

First linky party:  Jen from The Teacher's Cauldron is having a New Year linky party to share resolutions.

Then Lorraine from Fabulous 4th Grade Froggies  is having a "First 12 in the Last of 12" linky party.  So I'll be looking ahead at 2013 as well as reflecting back on 2012.

I'll start by first looking ahead.  My PERSONAL goal for 2013:  I need to build my physical stamina!  You see, two and a half years ago I had a stroke.  My left side is challenged and goes through all sorts of discomfort, but I "look" fine.  The hardest part for me has been the fatigue.  I get very tired easily, and need a whole lot more sleep than I used to.  That means that many of the things I can still do aren't a whole lot of fun for me because I'm too tired to enjoy them. After a day of school, I'm exhausted.  Then I use my weekends to rest up for the week.  Luckily, I've discovered blogging and that helps.  It's something that I can do that doesn't require physical energy!  I'm not so sure how I'm going to build my stamina, but I'm going to work at it!

My BLOGGING goal for 2013:  I plan to look for more opportunities to show Acts of Kindness to other teacher bloggers.  I've been blessed to be in such a great community of teacher bloggers, and I really want to do what I can to help them achieve success.

Now for the reflecting back.  Here are the first 12 posts I made on Elementary Matters of 2012.  I'm enjoying these memories!

1/2/12  Writer's Workshop  I'm a big fan of writer's workshop, and I'm lucky that I've had some great training.  In this post I shared some of my materials for writer's workshop.

1/2/12 Pay it Forward in the New Year I love to share the materials of other teacher bloggers.  On this post I shared several materials, including some for the new year.  (I'm sure they're still good a year later!)


1/3/12 Filling Our Buckets  I read the "bucket book" to my students for a welcome back activity, and they absolutely loved it.  I loved what they came up with for bucket filling ideas.

1/4/12 My Go To Book This was a fun linky party on teacher "go to" books!  It was a tough decision, but I settled on this Eric Jensen book.

1/7/12 Martin Luther King Jr. Resources  Here I've listed several books and videos to help the children learn about the life of Dr. King, including a nice clip of the end portion of his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.  (If you're a sentimental fool like me, that speech brings tears every time!)

1/8/12 Martin Luther King Jr. Activities This is another "Pay it Forward" post.  I've listed some of my favorite activities from teacher bloggers and materials from Teachers Pay Teachers.

1/12/12  Lessons Learned  This is a favorite post of mine, and a personal story that I repeat often to parents who need to learn to let their children become independent, a lesson I learned from parenting.

1/14/12  An Opportunity to Help This blog post was a plea to join a unique linky party for helping teachers in Joplin, MO who lost everything due to tornadoes.

1/15/12 Writing Warm Up I posted about some frustrations I was having with Writer's Workshop, and a possible solution.

1/18/12 A Day in My Shoes This is a description of my day, as part of a linky party.

1/20/12 Winter in New Hampshire  I wrote this post after a snow here in New Hampshire.

1/22/12 Are You Ready for Some Football?  Here in New England at this time last year, we were hoping that our Patriots would make it to the Super Bowl.  (They did!)  In honor of that, I made a football themed game to practice verbs.

Well, those were my first 12 posts from 2012.  I certainly enjoyed that little trip through memory lane.  I found some things I want to go back to, that I'll use again for the new year as well as things for celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King.  I hope you enjoy these posts as well!