Ready for Tuesday

Boy oh boy, am I ready for Tuesday. 

This week everyone has zero motivation for getting stuff done.  The kids are feeling antsy (or maybe that's just me).  One of the public school teachers had a meeting over here today and she said her students are acting the same way. 

We tried to do a lab at the tail end of 7/8th grade science today.  It sort of worked.  There were three stations for them to go to, each one covering a different topic we've learned about this/last week.  One was making sand dunes with a hairdryer.  I tested it this morning and our room got really dusty, so I had them take it on the porch outside the classroom.  Of course the girls were all complaining about being cold.  And it was windy too so the sand already blew around.  Another station was making waves to change the "seashore."  Some groups got a little crazy making waves in the tub and splashed water over the edges.  "TSUNAMI!" they shouted.  The third station was for measuring the angle of repose (aka- the slope where material stops falling down- think of a pile of corn).  I didn't have enough sand out for them or else my protractors were too big.  They had a hard time measuring.  Plus we didn't have quite enough time to finish every station.

However, the 5th graders benefited from the lab materials left behind by their peers.  Our topic in science today was meteors and meteorites.  One student didn't believe that a little rock could make such a big dent in the earth.  So we tested it.  Each student got to take an object (tennis ball, rock, penny) and drop it from the same height to see how big of a dent it made.  It kind of worked.  We tried it on both wet and dry sand.  I think it would've worked better to have thrown it with a bit of force.  Oh well.  Maybe we'll try it again next week.

Tomorrow is going to be a bit of a fun day.  We have chapel, possibly reading buddies, and need to finish writing our NaNo stories/pen pal letters.  In the afternoon, Mr. D invited our class to have recess with his after we're done with math.  Then after that, I'm going to show pictures from my Ireland trip to the 3rd-5th graders (since they haven't seen them before).  Once that's done, we just have Christmas program practice and it's already the end of the day!

I've been working up a storm trying to get my lessons done for next week so I don't have to bring them home with me over Thanksgiving.  I think I have almost all of them done.  Maybe three more lessons to do.  Hopefully I can knock some more of those out of the way tonight.