Freedom!

No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks!  Oh wait... it's just Christmas break.


We crammed everything into the day that we had planned.  Program practice went off without a hitch!  Everyone (and by everyone, I mean the teachers) say they feel really comfortable with the program and aren't too worried at all.  It's going to be good.


My students were astounded at how many presents under the tree were for me... I think there was eight or nine?  Most of them were gift cards to Barnes and Nobel... yay! More books for the classroom!  Surprisingly, I only got one scarf!  It's in sort of camouflage colors with butterflies (though the student who gave it to me said he thought they looked like ducks).  Another one of those wax melter things is coming home with me along with some cinnamon scented and sugar-cookie scented wax.  Maybe I should leave one of them at school to minimize the smell in our classroom, not that it smells bad, but it could smell better.


Another surprise: nearly all my students guessed what the letters meant.  HP= hockey puck, NF= Nerf football (two kids asked for those), BC= baseball cards, SH= sparkly headband, LOC= lots of candy.  One kid put down random letters for his initials and he ended up with LEGOS.  Another asked for LP and he got lots of pennies (10,000 to be exact).  That's why the present was so heavy!  The girl who asked for OP (origami paper) got orange pop.  Another kid asked for SH and he got a Santa hat, a Scheels hat, and skittles and some other candy.  I don't think that's what he wanted, but he wasn't complaining!


Although most of them complained about the all-school movie choice, it seemed they enjoyed watching Balto.  Mr. E and I were discussing movie choices and he wants to go back to the 80s and 90s movies before TV turned "bad".  All the kids have seen the newer movies and each one seems to have more and more not-school-appropriate things, so why not show them the classics?  I think that's a great idea.  Now it's making me rethink my decision to show Meet the Robinsons as our class prize in January... I really want to switch to Fivel Goes West.  But will I have a mutiny on my hands if I do?  That remains to be seen...


Plans for Christmas break:  Hang out in Courtland until after the program Sunday night.  If the weather's good, I'll drive down to Fulda that night.  If there isn't good weather, I'll head down Monday morning.  I need to be back in Courtland Wednesday afternoon to get ready for Round 2 of the program, and again depending on the weather, I'll go back to Fulda that night or the next morning.  After that... my schedule is wide open aside from the few days I'm scheduled to work at the Fulda library.  All my papers are corrected (yay!) and my to-do list for lesson planning is pretty short.  Plenty of time to bother my siblings and read lots of books!