Last day of full time teaching

Today was my last day of full time teaching.  Next week will begin the gradual giving back of subject areas until I'm not teaching anything anymore.  Yesterday, I told my approaching level small reading group that it was my last day teaching them in the small group.  They immediately protesting, "What? Why?" "Already?" "Why can't you keep teaching us?" "Does this mean you're leaving soon?" "Awww!" "I'm going to be sad when you leave."  If that response isn't enough to warm your heart, I don't know what is.

My 4th graders kept bugging me today to see if we were going to work in the computer lab on our Storyjumper.com stories.  This website lets people write, illustrate, and publish their own books (and can be purchased as a hardcover book, for a price).  My students are turning the adventure stories they've written into an illustrated book.  This project fit in nicely with the author/illustrator who spoke at our school a few weeks ago.  She mentioned that she likes to have a specific object hidden on each page (she referenced Mercer Mayer's Little Critter series).  I noticed a few of the boys took this to heart; one boy told me he put an acorn on every page "like a real author!"  The other boy I noticed put a red pop can in almost all his pages (his story is about a hunter in the woods, so it kind of fits).

I didn't actually teach a whole lot today.  One of the students "bought" a movie privilege with her Dolphin Dollars (an incentive program my supervising teacher does to get students to write in their planners).  So that's how we spent our afternoon.  We did switch classes for social studies and science.  Mrs. M's class enjoyed learning about agriculture yet again.  Most students thought the animal x-rays were the most interesting along with the veterinarian tools.  Here are some other comments:

"I like the tools on the tractors."
"The most interesting thing is how you get the hay bales into the square and oval." [round and square bales]
"I thought the stuff about the bales was cool."
"The most interesting thing about today was about the money."  [We discussed how much farmers get paid for their livestock and how much it costs to raise animals/crops in a given year.]
"I enjoyed looking at the stuff from the vet."
"The most favorite thing is hay."

I found out tonight that this week is National Agriculture Week!  According to a sheep newsletter to which I subscribe, the message of National Agriculture Week was "to recognize and celebrate the abundance provided by agriculture. The program encourages every American to understand how food and fiber products are produced, value the essential role of agriculture in maintaining a strong economy and appreciate the role agriculture plays in providing safe, abundant and affordable products.  Each American farmer or rancher feeds more than 144 people. This is a dramatic increase from the 25 people that each producer fed in the 1960s. Quite simply, American agriculture is doing more and doing it better."