Blowing Snow

Colorful Drips

I worked hard to get these drips of melting snow as they sparkled and changed colors in the sun. I did a lot of zooming and a bit of cropping so it may look too grainy in this photo. But trust me, it was a pretty sight.

Sledding

Shorewood Beach

See the Olympics?

A Gate!

I was surprised to see that Shorewood beach is now truly inaccessible. When Anna Rae was little she and I would ignore the posted sign that said the beach for Shorewood on the Sound was for community club members only and she would wade or lob rocks into the water. This formidable gate was not installed until recent years.

Park Exit

Houses, bright sunshine, and blue water, such a surprising contrast to the seemingly secluded and small Shorewood Park.

Park #4

Park #3

Park #2

Park #1

Shorewood Park

Icy Roads

The neighborhood roads were very quiet aside from walkers and kids with sleds.

The Morning Result

So this was the measure at 8:30 this morning. Chris did go into work downtown, hitching a ride at the invitation of a neighbor. They were surprised to find less snow as they drove north. In fact, downtown Seattle had 2 inches or less. Shortly after he went to work, I was off on a walk through the winter wonderland of Shorewood on the Sound.

Our Street

And this was the view from the front porch.

A Lovely Sight

This is the view off of our deck last night when the snow was falling fast and furious. Tonight it will be just plain cold. It is 28 degrees out right now.

Snow in Seattle

So, as if a windstorm wasn't enough, now we get this! It is quite beautiful but I really don't want to be teaching up to the end of June. Also this week, I, along with about 20 other teachers, am taking a workshop entitled G.L.A.D. which is short for Guided Language Acquisition Design (I think that's right). The workshop is being held at our school in one of our 4th grades. It is a group of strategies for enhancing language comprehension and writing. It began primarily as a program for English language learners but they found that it was excellent for improving the vocabulary and comprehension, both oral and written, of all students. It also has cooperative learning and classroom management procedures built right into the teaching strategies. A couple of possible down sides of the program are: there is a lot of teacher prep involved, especially initially and if you don't have sizeable chunks of time with your whole class it might not work as well since the cooperative groups and children learning from each other is central to the strategies. In the morning we watch trainers teach the fourth graders and in the afternoon we debrief and work on making our own materials for our units. My teaching partner and I are working on our Animals unit from our Foss Science kit. We were just rolling right along and getting a whole lot done. Now who knows when they will reschedule the missing day (and possibly days). So that is that.