Caught at Work! FREEBIE!

What do you get when you put two Sugar Bears into a classroom of first graders? Mayhem! Well maybe not quite mayhem, but something close to it! These cute little visitors were so much more interesting than anything I could provide. Guess who got the attention? Yep! The  Sugar Bears. Talking about what animals would make good pets one of my sweet owlets mentioned Sugar Bears. I had never heard of them and even questioned him about whether it was a real animal or not! It is and I have pictures to prove it!

I have had some amazing days this past week. My students are doing a great job building stamina in all of their Daily Fives. The hardest Daily for this group is the Read with a Partner time. They would rather wrestle with a partner, talk to a partner or play with a partner. It did help when I started taking pictures of kids doing the right thing...

I have wanted to come up with a way that students can monitor their own reading/work habits during our Daily Five. I am so excited to use this for the first time on Monday. As each student completes a Daily they'll be able to color in the number of owls for how they felt they worked during the Daily time. I'm excited to see if this will help them use their time more wisely. Feel free to use this rubric, too. I would love to have suggestions or ideas on how I could improve it.

Color in one owl if you'll try harder next time. Two owls if you worked some of the time. Three if you worked most of the time. Four if you worked harder than you ever have or the whole time!

Daily Five Clip Chart

Today had the beginnings of being a "terrible, horrible, no good very bad day"! We woke up to bright sunshine and not to our alarm clock. We had no electrical power. We had to get to church early today, so no time to shower or wash my hair...Yuck! No coffee could be made. We couldn't figure out how to use our "Smart" dumb phone to call Consumers Energy. During church I realized I had gone to college with the couple sitting behind me. They commented that I hadn't changed a bit...Great, dirty hair and no make-up is how they remember me!

I'm happy to say that things did look up! My young parent Bible class was very meaningful and we talked about being "Faith Whisperers" in the lives of our children. (This idea has come to me as I read The Book Whisperer which IS as good as everyone says!) I left church feeling very different than how I had walked in and was so happy to come home to a house lit up like a Christmas Tree! We had turned lights on, but not off during the outage!

I would be able to play with my electric toys! My daughter's bedroom has been converted into my craft room. Every vertical surface is covered with paper or fabric! No more basement for me . . . I'm moving up in the world! Check this out...

Underneath this paper there IS a bed!

Today I found yet more paper to laminate! I love the way these turned out...

Come closer!

I've been using my marker board to do my Daily Five rotations. This will be so much more fun. I used my Cricut to cut the puzzle pieces out and then laminated them with my very own PaperMonster laminator. The thick lamination is so sturdy this will last for years!! I used a dry erase marker to write on them, so they can be erased and used for all kinds of things! 

I love this machine! I'm so happy I get to give one away!
Will it be you? I hope so!

Did you know you can win your very own laminator? I blogged about it yesterday and today
I added another way to enter.  Just scroll down a little and see what I added!