Tonight was the church's annual Ice Cream Social. There's actually lots more food besides ice cream, a whole dinner, in fact. Then we had a PTL meeting, the first of the year. One of the parents dropped off some microscopes we're borrowing from a nearby public school. The science teacher we're borrowing them from also included some prepared slides of plant parts. My kids will be so excited to look through them tomorrow!
Speaking of science... today, we made jello plant cells. At first the 6th graders were all excited, but then I started putting fruit in.... and the boys became not so excited. I'm pretty sure the most common phrase of the hour was, "I'm not eatin' that!" And all the girls said, "Oh, that looks so good! It smells so yummy!" Unfortunately, our jello wasn't solid enough by the end of science for us to eat it, so we're going to have it for snack tomorrow. As an added bonus, we can review what all the parts are! Woohoo! Teachable moment!
I chastised the 7th and 8th graders today about not doing their best on their homework. I corrected all their papers last night and I kept getting more and more frustrated! Some of them put down silly answers that had nothing to do with the question. Others wrote down the smallest amount of information they could get away with. So. I told them that I was disappointed in them and that they could do better, that I expected them to do better, especially since I don't give them all that much to do for homework. After that, the class went a little smoother, but we'll see once I get their next homework assignment back. They were also asking about doing experiments, and I had to tell them that they're not ready yet. I don't trust them enough to follow my lead, so we're holding off on the experiments. Hopefully that will be incentive enough to get them to simmer down.
In other news, my class schedule is changing some more. Since two of my students are getting extra support in reading and math, we switched our reading and English times around. So after religion, we head straight in to English, followed by reading (instead of the other way around). And then today we had another change in our schedule.
It was rainy today, so all the kids had to play in the gym for recess. This afternoon we realized that the k-4th graders had recess the same time the 6-8th graders were supposed to have PE. There's definitely not enough room for crazy upperclassmen and hyperactive little ones to be in the same gym all winter. After much discussion, we figured out the older kids are just going to have Bells (music) when they would've had PE, and they'll have PE when they normally would've had Bells. I'm still going to do recess duty and art at the normal times. For some reason, this switch just didn't make sense in my head, no matter how much I tried to understand it. I think I got it now.
Recess in the gym is absolutely insane. Picture about 50 kids running around, throwing balls, bouncing on a mini trampoline, jump roping, bumping and setting volleyballs, begging the teachers to play with them, etc. I got bombarded by about five students all at once. One girl got poked in the eye (by accident) so I had to go sort that out. Another girl wanted me to play tennis with her (me throwing the ball and her hitting it). The teachers wanted to talk about switching the schedule around. So many people!
It's about 8:30pm. There are four kids in my room, playing on the computer. Parents are still meeting about upcoming fundraisers and their kids are kind of running wild. I would leave, but I don't trust them in my room. And my door is kind of hard to unlock. But I guess I'm just making excuses now.
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