It is Good Friday...And it has been good Friday! (1) Right now I'm hanging out with my girls watching Season 2 of Downton Abbey. We had to subscribe to Amazon Prime to be able to keep watching. We watched Season 1 when my oldest was home from college on her Spring Break and as soon as she came home for Easter we got started. It's our goal to finish this season by Sunday night!
(2) Did you see the full moon? Both morning and night I got to see its beauty shining down on us. It may have had an effect on my class, or it may have been all the jelly beans they were eating, too!
(3) Achievement testing is done. Yippee! Testing couldn't have come at a worse time. I would have loved to have had more time to celebrate Easter. We spent the the whole day on Thursday celebrating! We had an Easter egg hunt after coloring eggs and playing the game I shared yesterday!
(4) I found these cute, cute, cute, chickadees at Target. I immediately thought of my friend Laurie! Laurie, have you had these? My owlets LOVED them!! We did all kinds of math with them. I made up little stories about chickadees laying eggs(jelly beans!) and they had so much fun acting out the stories. They put them inside their egg shells...Their idea....and I ran around taking pictures!
(5) I've saved the best for last....Drum roll please! It is Spring Break...Did I say that already? Nope! I just scrolled up and I may have alluded to it, but I hadn't come right out and said SPRING BREAK! We went on a hike today and it didn't look much like spring. My family and I looked for signs of spring, but mostly saw snow!
I love linkin up with Doodle Bugs Teaching. Have you tried it? Who cares if it isn't Friday!
IT'S TIME!! It's time for a spring break, and I am ready to spring into it! The birds have been announcing spring every morning this week. I hope they know something I don't. I hope they know that spring weather will be heading our way soon. I have never traveled anywhere over spring break, but this year I'm going where it is even colder...Houghton, Michigan....brrrr! I'm happy to go anywhere that I don't have to cook or clean for a couple of days!
It is also time to go back and practice kindness. My owlets have gotten a little sloppy in the kindness department. We have been looking for ways to be kind to one another. We are going to work really hard to use our words and our hands to show kindness. We played this I Have Who Has game to remind ourselves that we need to take time for the really important things each day. If we make it through our "To-Do" list but haven't taken time to show love and kindness, then we are doing something wrong. We should always have time for love!
I love linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching! Coming up with five random things from the week is a much better use of my time than playing Candy Crush Saga on facebook!
1. I love having music in my classroom and I play it frequently as a way to transition, as a brain break and as background noise. Spotify is my most recent music source of choice. I upgraded to unlimited this week, so now I have NO ADDS!! Some the adds aren't very kid friendly, if you know what I mean. The kids favorite is Concerning Hobbits from the Lord of the Rings, while I prefer Organic White Noise for Babies! It sounds like a spring forest in my classroom thanks to Spotify!
2. We have needed brain breaks this week.... Achievement testing...'nough said and no pictures necessary!
3. Our 7th and 8th graders are spending a week in D.C. this spring. I get to go along as a chaperone, parent, and literature teacher. My daughter is in 8th grade, so I'm looking forward to this time with her. Anyway, the past two weeks we have had a Penny Wars fund raiser. Kids try to fill their own classroom buckets with pennies and other classrooms with silver and green money. The class with the most pennies after silver and green is subtracted from their amount wins a pizza party. I waited until today to bring in a box of pennies...
Yep...2500 pennies!
We passed this box around and guessed how much it weighed. Only three students guessed a weight under 100 pounds! I have some work to do on measuring weight! I'll announce the winner on Monday. What would your guess be?
4. My kids are having a great time seeing what kind of owl they are with these math challenges. I give them a minute and then they get to count how many they got correctly complete and give themselves a rating. I'm starting to add subtraction to the mix, too!
5. Do you know the game L, C, R? I love playing that game and used it as the basis for this game. My owlets love playing it and I hope yours will too!
That's my Five for the week...Now it's back to Candy Crush Saga and an early bedtime!
I have wanted to link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for quite some time. All week I told myself this Friday....This Friday. Friday came and I had the chance to spend the evening with the best husband in the whole wide world shopping for kitchen flooring, watching Rockford Files and just hanging out together. Just so you know the best husband in the whole wide world happens to be married to me, so I'm feeling quite lucky! Now I'm feeling a wee bit guilty sitting at my computer while he works to get the old flooring up and out!
Here are my five random things from the week...
1.On Monday I had to say goodbye to my oldest after she spent her spring break with us. She is one amazing girl. She is quirky, fun and talented. At this very moment she is visiting Wash-U in St. Louis. We were hoping she'd go to MSU just a couple hours from home. She is loving everything about St. Louis and looks like she'll be there for her graduate studies. I have so many family connections to St. Louis. My mother studied at Wash-U and so it seems only fitting that her namesake should go there, too. I wish it were closer, but I lived in St. Louis and I will love visiting her there. This amazing girl made everything in this picture! She cooked vegetarian meals for us all week. She wanted something special for her "last dance", so she whipped up a dress for herself and had to put on over 50 grommets!
2. I'm so excited to be planning a trip north for Spring Break! My daughter will be 11 hours south and my son will be 11 hours north next year. Over Spring Break we'll be visiting his college of choice in the beautiful Houghton, Michigan.
3. I had a Parent Visit Day this week. On Friday I invited my parents to come and watch my Owlets perform Super Brush to the Rescue. After performing it on stage we did it one last time in the classroom. The video production catches a lot of the noise from pages being turned, but I LOVE that they are all following along with their scrip and pretty much ignore the new tooth that joins the mouth. I was laughing through the whole thing, so it is a little shaky!
4. Some of our parents stayed and enjoyed the cast party. We celebrated by watching the original Lorax movie and eating Truffala Trees...Yum! All you need are pretzel rods, sherbet and Brown Barbaloots Chocolate Teddy Grahams!
5. Goodbye, Mr. Seamus G. Leprechaun. We loved your tricks and will miss you. Next time we'll catch you and find out where you keep your gold.
Seamus's last trick was to toilet paper the room. and leave green glitter everywhere! The janitor loves me!!
Thanks for visiting! I hope you'll be wearing the green tomorrow and dancing a jig. On St. Patrick's Day we're all Irish!
I have a naughty leprechaun in my classroom. Each morning Seamus has played some kind of trick on my owlets. They refuse to even try to make any fake gold because they like his tricks! They like finding the green sparkles he always leaves behind. They have written up some elaborate schemes for catching him, but I think they just want to be friends!
The first morning he spilled my coffee on the floor, then he left shaving cream at each person's place. Yesterday he left string that was attached at one end to a pencil and the other end to a bag of Lucky Charms. They got to give their small motor skills a work-out as they wrapped the string around the pencil to find the treat at the other end. Tomorrow I'm thinking it is time to toilet paper the chairs.
We've tried trapping him with a tape and today we thought we might be able to attract him to a field of clover. We're all hoping that he'll like the company of other leprechauns.
I was so glad to see Barbara's post yesterday. Her idea caused me to hear the words we love to hear..."This is the best day ever!" Go check out Barbara's post and follow the link to get your own leprechaun coloring page. Barbara, I'm sending you a little fun in an e-mail! I'm happy to share it with our other friends, too! Leave me a comment and your e-mail if you'd like a copy, too. If you'd rather buy it, you can HERE!!
I love me some cat in the hat. When Tammy showed me how to draw my very own, I was elated. I could hardly wait to share my new found artistic abilities with my owlets! I didn't even tell them what we were drawing, which added to the excitement. The next day we turned ourselves into the cat in the hat and wrote about it which was pretty awesome, too.
If you have not tried drawing The Cat using Forever in First's version, what are you waiting for? We are going to add some color, but only a little at a time. Check out this photo dump for some sweet ideas for a rainy day!
My boys love anything that goes on in the bathroom! This cat is standing on a toilet and holding an owl, among other things!
Last August a child who I have had as a student in music and computer classes died of a brain aneurysm. It hit me pretty hard as she was a classmate and friend of my daughter since preschool.She loved nature, and the last time I saw her was when I took her on a birding hike she had bid on and won at our school auction. She was so excited to spend the morning with me in the woods looking for birds. My only regret of the day is that I didn't bring my camera.We saw some awesome birds and enjoyed a lunch together, too. Malauri was always asking me questions about birds. Her mom told me that they found sketches of birds in her room with "Ask Mrs. Reck about...." I miss her so much.
Today we built birdhouses in memory of Malauri. Each multi-aged group put together a birdhouse kit that I found on Etsy. I also found a new friend. My friend Roger put together 10 kits for our school to build together. He is an amazing woodworker and worked with me through every step of the planning. If you ever need building kits, please consider checking out Roger's store. These birdhouses went together beautifully! The only thing that was missing was Malauri. She would have loved having her parents at school, building bluebird houses with her. She would have loved the cookies they brought. She would have loved watching the bluebirds build nests in these boxes. I hope that when I see her in Heaven I'm able to wrap my arms around her and tell her how much she was loved here on earth. I know that she is flying like the bluebirds and nesting in the arms of our loving Savior.
Ready to build
Some of the completed projects!
Malauri's parents making a house together.
Each child added to the project by pounding or painting.
Click above if you would like a bluebird ten frame!
I started doing Currently with my technology students in January. When they walked into class Monday they were all excited because they knew it was time to do March's Currently. I was so happy to think that I've created some great monsters bloggers! I have a couple of students who have really caught the bug and blog from home about different random subjects. Who cares if their pictures are upside down or backwards...They are putting their ideas down on "paper" and sharing it with the world.
Kidblog.org is free and easy to set up. It helps students have a purpose for writing and has provided teachers in my building ways to give assignments that allow students to express and publish their ideas in new ways. I would love to come check out your kid's blogs...Here is one of my groups!
I left my camera at school today...I hope...I can't find it anywhere in this house. This house is a mess right now. My daughter who I love is home on spring break and has spread her "stuff" all over the house. She is making a renaissance costume and it takes over two rooms of the house. She has made a fancy gourmet meal every day this week, so I can put up with the MESS for a couple more days.
Anyway, here's my Currently...
I'll be back tomorrow with some pictures of a cat who happens to be wearing a hat!
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