Cheesy Chicken & Broccoli Bake

Inspired by Kraft Food & Family Spring '09. This is a really great recipe and there was pretty much nothing leftover for the next day. It was delicious! It is also a really easy and quick meal to make on a week night after work. Most of the items I keep in my cabinet, freezer, or fridge and if I don't have one of the items, it is a quick stop at the store. 

A reasonably priced meal and even the little ones will love it! Isabelle was in love with the cheesy broccoli and adored the stuffing, despite her resistance to eating chicken at the time. This is also a great meal for the hubby to make if I'm working late. BONUS!


Cheesy Chicken & Broccoli Bake

Ingredients

• 2 pkg. (6 oz.) STOVE TOP Stuffing Mix for Chicken
• 1-1/2 lb. boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite-size pieces
• 1 pkg. (16 oz.) frozen broccoli florets, thawed, drained
• 1 can (10-3/4 oz.) reduced-sodium condensed cream of chicken soup
• 1/2 lb. (8 oz.) VELVEETA®, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
• Salt & Pepper

Instructions

1. Heat oven to 400ºF.
2. Prepare stuffing as directed on package. We used the microwave directions, which made it quicker, since you bake it to be crispy.
3. Combine remaining ingredients.
4. Spoon into 13x9-inch baking dish. Top with stuffing.
5. Bake 40 min. or until chicken is done and top is crispy.

Introduction Project

I wanted to do something fun with my students for the first week of class. Something that was familiar to them, but allowed them to be creative and share with me a little bit about themselves. I found these awesome worksheets while scrambling to get things organized for the first week and it was an great activity.

The worksheets were called Poppin' Into 6th Grade.  I got them from The Peanut Gallery with a film themed welcome back packet. I am all about the movies, so it was a perfect pack to help me orient myself. The students LOVED working on these. I then took their pictures and we taped them into the little photo spot. Then I hung them on the bulletin board in our classroom just in time for Open House. Students were excited to show them to their parents and then show their parents their friends from elementary school. The bulletin board had a filmstrip border with "I'm a Star" as the center. Apparently this is a popular border, as I've looked around the school and seen it in many, many classrooms.

When the students finished the Facebook style page (complete with a banner they could design), the students filled out a survey about themselves so that I could gather more information. Some of the students didn't want to put down "favorite" because they do not have a "favorite" anything, but I had to remind them to put down something that they like alot. Some students didn't have a favorite or even a liked TV show or movie. They said they  never watch TV or that they are never inside, because they are always outside playing sports. While there is nothing wrong with that, I wonder if someday they will realize how silly that sounds. Sure, we don't all watch TV, but most kids have seen movies and have ones that they like. Either way, the students enjoy working on it. I let the project guidelines be unstructured so that the students could really express themselves, but I suppose they needed more structure than I thought they did. I am actually surprised at how much structure and rigid guidelines they still need. Hopefully by the end of the year they will be a bit more independent and thinking more personally about decisions.

I wish I had pictures of the board, but I forgot. It was a great way for me to learn names and put them with faces right away in the first week. Next year I would have the students share their pages before I collected them. They were all moving at such different paces that it was difficult to make the presentations work this year.

Quick Classroom Part 2

I only had a few days to get my classroom put together for my students to arrive. Here is what I was able to do with a husband, a laminator, and a three-day weekend.

After the Weekend

The Classroom

The Science Side of the Classroom

The Literacy Lounge (Still Needs Work) 

 

Quick Classroom Part 1

I only had a few days to get my classroom put together for my students to arrive. Here is what I was able to do with a husband, a laminator, and a three-day weekend.

The Original Room

A Graduate Part 1

I have finally finished school and graduated from my final degree before pursuing an actual career. . . not just another part-time-go-nowhere job. I suppose if I don't fill you in on the background, this particular statement might not be as meaningful as it really is. First of all, I'm 31-years-old. I am part the generation that saw the devaluing of a high school diploma, a required bachelors for even the most rudimentary of careers and the rise of the accessible and preferred Master's degree.  Through a series of missteps, soul-crushing events, and family tragedy, I was finally able to hack through the dense reality of my world and embrace the dream I had been longing for.

The Shape-Shifting Dream
There were several dreams I channeled through when I was younger.  In high school I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a journalist and write breaking stories and report on events. I abandoned that dream when my high school newspaper's student editor rewrote my article on a German Class Field Trip and put my name on it. Something about that seemed beyond inappropriate and it was a very sore spot for me. I ended up starting my own literary magazine for poems and stories that would not be destroyed or manipulated as long as spelling was in place. This magazine became defunct when I left.  I graduated a year early with stellar grades and I didn't have that extra senior year to prepare myself for what career I really wanted to pursue.

When I chose my undergraduate school, I chose it because I wanted to be a Marine Biologist and study sharks. The school I chose had a professor who was a Marine Biologist and they offered a Winter Term Marine Ecology class! I knew I had to do this. Sadly, my first rejection came in the form of bureaucratic red tape. The chemistry syllabus didn't say so, but apparently I needed my small private college to confirm that I was having surgery and had been legitimately sick on-and-off the bulk of my first semester. I failed chemistry because I had missed too many classes due to illness.  Being rather naïve as a 17-year-old, I didn't realize that this misunderstanding of a grade would follow me for the rest of my academic career. I decided, though, after the horrible experience I had with Chemistry and Calculus in my first semester as a Freshman, I was going to switch career tracks from Biology to English Literature, swapping my Major and Minor.

I could still experience the best of both worlds if I majored in English Literature and minored in Biology. Ah, but that tricky little bugger that is Fate wouldn't let me get away with it. I didn't do as well as I had hoped in Biology. I had to dissect a piggy and then on the final test I had to know what all the organs were. All the organs looked the same to me. . .they were all the same color and several were all the same shape. That was my downfall. 

So as the little piggy was tossed into the trash, so were my dreams of pursuing a degree in Marine Biology. I mentioned before how naïve I was and that didn't end there. I probably should have left home for Florida or California to pursue that particular dream, since being a landlocked state wasn't really furthering my dreams of floating in the ocean observing marine life.  What burned even further was when I took the Marine Ecology class that was spent in the field (Ochio Rios, Jamaica) during the Winter Term, I aced the entire thing and showed a real passion for marine life, as I spent every available minute in the bay observing the underwater world of Discovery Bay.

Is this blog feeling all negative, rejected, and like some sort of pity-fest? I don't mean for it to be that way. Like I said right away, I had a lot of missteps getting to the point where I am now. And there were even more than what is listed above, but the biggest one came in the form of what I chose to pursue next. I really was out of my depth in every area I looked into, because I never really had a mentor and I guess I never really understood what was being explained to me. I was missing something. Part of me wonders if it was due to missing my senior year, which it could have been, but I was struggling and I was idealistic and strong-willed. I was also being told I could do whatever I was meant to do and being a professor was a great job because the pay was great. I convinced myself that being a professor was what I should have been.

I fell in love with film in the summer of 2001. Most of this was due to the one person I did look up to at the college, Dr. Fraser. I threw myself headfirst into film. Immersion was my goal, but I approached film from an assessment perspective, not a filmmaking one. I never wanted to make film. I don't feel imbued with enough visionary purpose to assume that I could and, if I can't even write a short story, how was I going to create a story to make a film about? I wanted to write film criticism and with my husband at my side, we embarked on a ten year journey into the world of film criticism.

Oh what a world it is! I'm not going to expose the details of what all went on with us, but let's just say my husband and I were some of the hardest working, most honest, and down-to-earth critics you could find. We held tight to our guidelines for criticism and lost the battle of the snarky cynics that flooded the online critic's scene. There is very little place for well-crafted, honestly written criticism without some sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge-sharp-tongued-wit and jaded cynicism.  I was either not passionate enough within the academic field of film studies or I wasn't pop-culture-personified enough. So be it.

My abandonment of film began in 2008 after my husband and I sold everything and moved to Edinburgh, Scotland. I was pursuing a PhD in film studies. I had started some work on nuns in film for my Masters at NC State. I wanted to continue the work. There is startlingly little out there on the character of the nun or her importance in Western Culture which, I believe, is quite important indeed. The resources are limited and the nun is a character that so permeates visual culture that I wanted to work to find the connection. It boiled down to the fact that the University I was attending in Edinburgh jerked me around, played some pretty harsh and life-altering games, and destroyed me. I cannot aptly describe the level of destruction which was imposed on my sense of self-worth and value, but my view of myself was quickly declining because everything I was doing was wrong to everyone. I was in a foreign country where within the circles I moved, I was the inferior American. I was rejected by my professors for not embracing the philosopher Deluze in my own work. I was alone. I threw myself into traveling and day trips. I tried to meet new people and learn more about where I lived. I withdrew farther and farther from what I so passionately advocated and made part of my life.

I wasn't meant to be a professor. . . I wasn't dedicated enough to the lifestyle of a professor. . . it was starting to dawn on me that what I wanted to do was teach and being a professor wasn't so much about teaching as it was about getting work published and teaching to pay for the opportunity to research. Another misstep. . . .
 

. . .to be continued. . .

Teaching is . . .