What's the story Wishbone?

Oh man, what a day!

It started out great, got bogged down in the middle, and is ending on a high note.  Strange how that works, isn't it?

VIP Day was today, aka- Grandparent's Day.  My 5th graders brought their families to school and showed them the classroom.  We started with our normal routine of lunch count, flag pledges, and devotions.  Then I had the 5th graders pick some books to read with their VIPs.  Most of them chose Robert Munsch books.  Speaking of Robert Munsch...  my students love his books so much.  I'm amazed at how many times they'll go back and reread a book or listen to it during Listen to Reading time.  One 5th grader is bummed every day when he tries to listen to his favorite book, 50 Below Zero.  The link doesn't work, but he tries every day.  So I secretly emailed "Bob" through his website and got the following email in reply,

"Hi Emily:

Thanks for writing and for sharing my books with each other. I really appreciate it.

If you send me a class letter I will send back an unpublished story using some names from the class, a poster and a letter answering questions that kids most often ask. My mailing address is 15 Sharon Place, Guelph, Ontario N1H 7V2

Bob Munsch"

 

Guess what we're going to do tomorrow in reading???

 

But back to VIP Day...  after reading for while, it was time for donuts in the gym.  And after donuts it was time for The Amazing Magic Jack, our entertainment for the day.  What's really ironic was that I watched the movie Now You See Me yesterday, so I was in a magic frame of mind.  Since I stood to the side, I could see how he did a lot of his tricks.  He was a great hit with the students and their VIPs.  After the VIPs left, we got back to business with our spelling pretest.  Or not.  The spelling list in my teacher's manual was not the same words as what was in the 5th graders' workbooks.  Sigh.  Great.  After flipping through my manual, I found this week's list about three weeks later in my book.  This is getting ridiculous!  Last week I finally got around to emailing the company about their lack of a 2011 teacher's spelling book.  So now it's just a waiting game.  We did get our spelling pretest figured out.  But the computers weren't working today, which involved a call to the IT guys.  They got fixed right when it was time to start English (so, right when we didn't need to use them). 

 

The sentences in our English book were about Odysseus and the Trojan Horse.  Of course the 5th graders wanted to learn more about them.  I found a picture of the Trojan horse, which led to a website with the story, which led to a memory dredged from my childhood... The Odyssey.  Togas.  A guy shooting an arrow through a bunch of axes.  Wishbone.  Bingo!  I found the full episode on Youtube, so now I just need to figure out when our class can watch it...

 

In science today, we watched an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy.  It was a review of what we learned about food webs last week.  The 5th graders kept turning around to look at me every time someone onscreen mentioned something we talked about last week.  Then during recess, they were singing some of the songs played in the episode.  But recess ended on a less than high note.  Everyone was super grouchy and whiny, it was ridiculous.  I finally got fed up enough to call off recess.  We went in 10 minutes early and on the way inside everyone was pointing the finger at everybody else in our class.  "It's your fault!"  Ugh!  I told them all to go to bed early tonight to get a good night's sleep.

 

Then we took another class picture to send to our Slovakian pen pals (because someone made a weird face in the one we took last week).  But there was an argument over who got to hold Joe in the picture.  I drew a name out of a jar and Ms. J. (our para) was the winner!  She gave up her "holding rights" to the student whose turn it was on Friday.  This made today's helper angry because she didn't get to hold Joe and she felt that it was her right (she was also the student who made the weird face in the last picture).  So as soon as the picture was done, she stormed out of the room and hid in the loft outside our classroom.  I thought she was in the bathroom, so no one went looking for her.  Pretty soon she climbed down and another 5th grader blew the whistle on her.  She got even more upset, "Tattletale!!!"  and ran into the gym where she promptly hid.  By this point, I was done playing her games, so I got the rest of the 5th graders ready for the end of the day and Ms. J talked her back into our room.  Whew!

 

But like I said, the day ended on a high note.  I printed off the letters from our Slovakian pen pals.  They turned out great!  The Slovakian students have very neat handwriting, wrote in cursive, and included pictures.  It kind of made our letters look shabby in comparison.  Oh well, we'll redeem ourselves with this next project.  I think we're going to do, "Tell About Your Family" or something along those lines.