Hey guys! I hope you are having a great summer so far (OR a great school year if you are still with your sweet babies!) 

Have you been watching any fabulous shows lately? I finished Orange is the New Black and holy moly…that show is crazy. I love it! I think Crazy Eyes and P are my favorite! I LOVE that this season goes more in to the back-stories of each character. I couldn’t wait for Season 2, and it was everything I hoped for!! 

 

OITNB is definitely 2nd to my true love of the summer…SCANDAL! I LOVE SCANDAL!!! I know some of you are thinking it’s a girly show, but it’s not…there is SO much awesomeness wrapped up with Olivia Pope. I can’t get enough. I don’t know how to talk about it without spoiling anything, but I will just tell you…WATCH it! 

Hubby and I went to the Dominican Republic with his family and we had SO much fun. I don’t have many pictures…I didn’t take my phone. 🙂 I took my iPad but I think this is the only one I took, haha! 

I did finish the Book Whisperer while I was there. It was great…definitely recommend it! I’m hoping to do a blog post this week about what I learned! Hold me to it friends! 

Now on to the good stuff! I wanted to share a new app you might have heard about. Zach contacted me to review it, and I didn’t know how I would feel about it when I agreed. But this is actually a fabulous app. I can see using it in tons of ways in my classroom, but also with my sweet Liam. It’s an iPad app…there is also a free story for iPhone…Beauty and the Beast. 🙂 

When you open it up, you can enter different lands with different types of stories that can be read aloud or your kiddos can read it themselves. There is a way to turn the pages automatically, or they can turn them. 🙂 

There are tons of Fiction and Nonfiction titles to choose from…and I LOVE that they are leveled. I’m not sure what they correlate too, but it would be super easy to tell your kiddos what level to stay on. OR let them have at it and choose for themselves since they can be read aloud. 🙂 

I love this Level 1 Reader…perfect for Emergent kiddos. It highlights the words as it reads them!

Here are a few other ones for Emergent Readers. 

I love that this app has Fairy Tales and Traditional Tales because it’s a Standard and it’s hard for me to find tales that my lower level readers can read. 

I also love the Nonfiction texts…I know my boys would LOVE this book full of Nonfiction Text Features.

This reminds me of the really thick NF books that my boys pick up, and can’t always read. The text is really small and there is SO much information on a page. But, I love that now they have some texts that are accessible. 

I definitely recommend this app for anyone with kiddos at home or looking for a listening station in their classroom. 🙂 

One last thing…tomorrow I am starting 3 Weeks No Cheats and I am pumped! It was hard with vacay, and my stomach hasn’t felt great since then. So I’m starting tomorrow…Rachelle and Katie King have been such an inspiration. 3 Weeks No Cheats is Rachelle’s idea and I knew I needed to wait until after the Dominican to start and go full force. So…here are my goals for the 3 weeks. I hope you will set your own and join me!

Now I’m off to watch some more Scandal and then go to a baby shower for sweet Ashley over at Flying High in First Grade! I can’t wait for her shower today. I know that sweet Reagen is going to be so precious! Have a great weekend! See you soon! 🙂