Word family tubes to practice real and nonsense words

I made these tubes for my first grade reading students to practice reading word families. The kids absolutely love them. These rolls are made out of brown paper towel tubes (cut in half) with white toilet paper tubes on top. I also tried using toilet paper tubes with paper to spin around but they're not very sturdy.

The tubes have one word family ending on the front and one on the reverse side, so each roll has two sets of words on it. Some are real and some are nonsense words. To read the words, the kids spin around the white tube.

The students use these as a warm up. While I am getting out our lesson materials for the day, they pick up one of these and read the words until I say stop.

Happy New Year!

As a New Year Commitment, my boyfriend and I have decided to take on a 21 Day Healthy Eating Challenge. I say "commitment" and not "resolution" because the latter always seems to be broken!

Daniel and I started out with an idea to do a 21 Day Cleanse. Most of the cleanse plans I found were pretty extreme, eliminating all carbs, sugars, beans, nuts, and even certain types of vegetables such as eggplant and tomato. This would be an interesting challenge sometime, but we were hoping to find something a little less restrictive.

What we settled on was a further modified version of this healthy eating plate from the Harvard School of Public Health:

In addition to the recommendations here to avoid refined grains, sugary drinks, and processed meats, we are also avoiding any processed foods (meaning any ingredient on a label that we don't recognize), fried foods, and alcohol.

I cleaned out our cupboards today and took out all the boxes, cans, and bags that didn't meet these requirements. Actually, I already eat a fairly healthy diet, so it surprised me how much junk I found! There was the stuff you might expect - packages of cookies, canned soup - but also some stuff that I consider to be "good" choices, like Cliff brand energy bars.

We also stocked up on bags of frozen vegetables at the store yesterday. Fresh fruits and veggies are so much tastier, but the frozen ones are convenient when you're hungry and in a hurry.

Today I made roasted chick peas for the first time! The recipe I used was from the blog How Sweet It Is (www.howsweeteats.com). They were easy, good, and one cup of them has 50% of recommended daily fiber!

I hope to keep this blog updated with posts on how it goes for us. Does anyone want to join us? It's only for 21 days!

Finally, here are some websites with great information on whole foods and healthy eating:

http://www.100daysofrealfood.com/
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/
http://www.choosemyplate.gov/
http://www.doctoroz.com/topic/nutrition
http://www.biggestloser.com/nutrition/search-recipes


Happy New Year, and cheers to 2014 being the best yet!
Haley