Fake Injury Day

Everyone looked pretty rough today.  Mr. D had a black eye and cuts all over his face.  Mrs. M broke her neck.  A 7th grader tore her ACL.  About a third of the school had an arm in a sling.  Tons of Band-Aids were showing.  I have a feeling we'll all make a miraculous recovery overnight. 


My 5th graders had the brilliant idea to use red markers to make their bandages look more realistic... some went a little overboard.  I can only imagine what their parents will think.  Actually, I do know what one parent thought.  She called me after school to see if I had sanctioned the activity.  She was more upset that the bandage had been ruined than the fact that her daughter had been making fake injuries on her body (which was what I thought she'd be more worried about).  This student had told me that the bandage was supposed to be thrown away if it got too distracting, so I was operating under the assumption that it was disposable (and I didn't look closer to see if that was actually the case).  Well, it wasn't.  Thankfully, the mom didn't seem mad at me, probably since her daughter knew she was supposed to bring the bandage home again. 


We're celebrating Joe's birthday tomorrow.  I think I forgot to tell the 5th graders.  Oops!  We had some leftover candy from our Witness Bags activity this afternoon, so I have it sitting in a bowl on top of his terrarium.  I think I'll bring some cookies from home too to celebrate. 

Joe and the Cheerleaders

Mrs. E wanted to have cheer practice in my room today.  My room doesn't have a lot of activities for K-2nd graders, but I thought, why not?  So the nine girls and I trekked down to my room while Mrs. E got the snack ready. 


The two kindergartners wanted to watch Joe and then I had the brilliant idea to take him for a walk!  So we took him out of his pen and let him walk around.  He didn't get very far.  All the little girls crowded around him wanting to pet him and hold him.  Their mouths were moving at a mile-a-minute asking questions about our awesome class pet.  Then one of them asked if he was going to poop on the floor. 
"Nope, he only poops after he has a bath."
"Ohhh!  Can we give him a bath?"
I sent two of the second graders to get him some bath water.  They got it just right!  The perfect depth, the perfect temperature...  all that was left was to put him in the tub.  And then the cheerleaders jostled around to get the best spot to watch him.  There were enough of them gathered around the little ice cream pail that some people couldn't see.  So then a few girls ran off crying because someone had yelled at them because they couldn't see and then I had to coax them back and try to referee the other girls... finally everyone got situated and we settled in to wait.  Every few seconds someone would ask when he was going to poop. 


He didn't end up going to the bathroom.  We put him back in his pen and then they switched their attention to the smartboard.  And then I had to police who got to write on the board and which person's turn was next... and finally Mrs. E brought the popcorn.  One girl had a loose tooth that was bothering her, so I read them the Robert Munsch book Andrew's Loose Tooth.  And then we finally got down to cheering. 


We learned two new cheers today and added a surprise to our actions in the school song.  I told the girls we have to keep it a secret until Friday at our school's pep fest.  Half of them said they couldn't do it; it would be too hard.  But I've heard from multiple sources that the cheerleaders have a secret and they aren't telling!

At long last...

It seems really weird to say this, but I'm really glad to be back at school.  What with all the cruddy weather we've been having, we haven't had a normal week yet!  I guess this week won't be much different since it's National Lutheran Schools' Week.  We had Twin Day today and played games in the classrooms (and had root beer floats).


This year, instead of just having root beer, we also had orange pop that people could have with their ice cream.  I was really surprised how many people took orange!  I guess it tastes like a cream-sicle. 


We had two hours late this morning, so there isn't much school day to talk about.  We finished up our movie about integration, I badgered the 7th and 8th graders to turn their stuff in, and we learned about slavery in colonial America.  The 5th graders were super in-to the topic!  I can't wait to teach them more about the 3/5ths compromise and Westward Expansion (we touched on them briefly today). 

Scooters and a Guest Visitor

We had to do some schedule switching this afternoon what with our day off school yesterday.  Sunday all the kids sing and the 7th and 8th graders play bells.  The bell players have only had two or three practices, so Mrs. M wanted to squeeze another practice in today.  It took a bit of finagling, but we got it squared away.  I ended up in the gym watching Mrs. M's 1st and 2nd graders.  Before she left, she asked me how I thought about her students getting out the scooters, but by the time we got to the gym the kids were cruising.


I remember scooters being one of the best things to play at recess, second only to the parachute.  As a teacher, scooters are accidents waiting to happen.  I let them go with the warning that as soon as it got too crazy or someone got hurt we'd put them away.  Pretty soon the 1st grade girls had one of the 5th graders dragging them around the gym.  The scooters we have connect to each other, so they made a scooter chain and had my 5th grader lead them with a hula hoop.  A few other students not part of the chain were playing some sort of tag game that sometimes caused them to slide off the scooter or get really close to crashing into the walls.  There were a couple close calls... No one got hurt though! 


Sunday is supposed to be another blizzard.  Mrs. E and I met to discuss what would happen with our WOW Zone school activity if the weather should be bad.  And then we talked about what to do if school is cancelled on Monday.  Ugh!  I'm ready for spring.


I got back to my room to start putting everything back to rights and I heard footsteps outside my door.  Everyone was gone, but I thought I had heard someone pull up to school... In walked my dad!  He had been looking at a tractor in the area and stopped by for a visit.  :)  What a great surprise!

Stir Crazy

I never thought myself one to go a little stir crazy, but I suppose there's a first time for everything.


School was cancelled again today because of the cold.  I spent the morning hunkered down in my living room reading books.  And then made some lunch.  And then did some lesson planning.  And then I ran out of things to do at home.


So I made the trek to school to do some work.


At school, I ran into the electrician, who's still trying to fix the heat in my classroom.  Mr. E was also there and he walked me through the heater's problems.  Last night, the temp in my room got down to 47 degrees!  Good thing Joe has his heat lamp or we'd have a very cold tortoise!  It turns out that when the heating element fizzled out, it kicked off the breaker in the fuse box and also the router thing that's in the ceiling.  A lot of that is over my head, but essentially the thing that tells the heaters on one side of the room to turn off and on is broken.  The electrician ordered parts yesterday, but the truck forgot to pick them up.  He rerouted something so that the heaters will run and now the temp is up to 56.  So now we wait until tomorrow morning.  The electrician is going to come back around 10:00... just in time for 2nd grade math.  Oh joy.  Let's hope they have their focusing hats on tomorrow!

Early Out

We got out of school at 10:45 today.  Well, one of the schools did.  The other school that we go by wasn't going to send kids home until 12:00.  So I had two of my kids on the early bus and two that stayed for the late bus.  We still had lunch and a little bit of recess.


And then... we missed the bus.  I didn't even see the bus pull in.  It must've been in and out in a minute!  But the blame is not mine alone.  This student was taking her sweet time packing up and heading out to the bus.  And one of the other teachers waved the bus off (she probably thought everyone was on it).  Thankfully, the school cook goes in that direction and she volunteered to bring this student home.  Then I had to make a phone call to her mom letting mom know this kid missed the bus.  The mom was a lot calmer about the situation than I thought she'd be.  She was really glad we had a solution already in place when I called her. 


Anyway, now it's time for me to head home.  I hope I'll be able to see the roads!

Divided Loyalties

The brackets for the "Cutties" tournament came out today (aka- the Lakefield Tournament).  Normally people leave around noon and there's no school in the afternoon for the upper grades.  This year, the girls have a bye the first game (so they don't play until Saturday) and the boys... the boys play Fulda.  Oh man!  Do I cheer for my brother's team or for my students' team?  The 5th graders were trying to persuade me to cheer for them.  And then they tried to get the insider scoop, "Is your brother's team good?"  Since I haven't seen them play, I didn't have an answer for them.


The past few days I've noticed one of my students saying "Oh man!" a lot.  I wondered where she picked up the phrase and then I realized... it was me.  It's pretty much my go-to phrase when my kids are telling me a story that's supposed to be super dramatic and full of shocking events.  Today I caught myself saying that phrase at least seven or eight times.  Maybe I need to cut back...


National Lutheran School's Week is next week.  Miss H. (the preschool teacher) put up posters announcing the dress up days for the week.  Monday= PJ Day, Tuesday= Twin Day, Wednesday= Dress Up Day, Thursday= Fake Injury Day, Friday= Blue and Gold Day.  It's coming up super fast!

Passion for Fashion

My little fashionista student walks into the classroom this morning and says to me, "Miss H., do you like my outfit today?  Is it stylish?"  When I made my typical, "Oh sure, yeah, you look good" reply, she said, "Oh, cause I don't think so.  I think this outfit totally looked better in my head."  And then she went on to gush about my fashion sense and how she wishes she could be my twin because I always look so fashionable and she likes my boots and my hair and my shirts and my scarves and blah-te-blah-te-blah.  And then, wanting a statement to sum up the full effect of my fashion sensibilities, she declared, "Miss H.  You've got the passion for fashion!"  Well.  I had no idea.


Today everyone had a hard time focusing.  On anything.  5th graders, 2nd graders, 7th and 8th graders... all of them totally off the wall.


It didn't help this morning that the guy came to fix the heaters in our room.  One of the heaters hasn't been putting out any heat for the past week or so, and our classroom has been a little chillier than usual (the other heaters can only crank out so much heat at a time).  I figured my 5th graders would be able to handle the intrusion, but the guy still wasn't finished when it was time for 2nd grade math.  And you know how well these 2nd graders can focus...


So it was mass chaos.  And here I was, actually trying to work through some math problems together with the 2nd grades.  They were spinning around in their seats, trying to watch the guy do his thing.  The 5th graders are trying to focus, but when you have a stranger taking things off the wall and 5 noisy 2nd graders clamoring for attention, it's hard to get much of anything done.  To top it off, Mr. E popped in a couple times to see how the heater fixing was going.  Sigh.


They have to solder a part onto the heater, so the guy took it with him.  He's supposed to bring it back either today or tomorrow.  We're potentially going to have a blizzard tomorrow afternoon; we'll see how it goes.


Now it's time for cheerleading practice.  And then there's PTL tonight.  Good thing I got my groceries and library stuff yesterday! 

The Blustery Day

The weather is gross.  Gross, gross, gross.  It was so windy this afternoon that we couldn't even see across the road.  We almost blew over getting on the bus to Nicollet!


But school was not called off.  The wind was supposed to die down by 3:00, but it's still blowing pretty hard. 


The play at Nicollet was a spinoff of Alice in Wonderland.  The theme was something along the lines of "You can't run away from your problems; they just get worse.  You need to stand up for what's right.  This will help you and others too." 


The costumes were pretty sweet.  There was quite a bit of singing (man, they sang good harmony!).  Definitely your run-of-the-mill theater students.  I wasn't a huge fan of the relationships in the play.  The mom was portrayed as being super strict and almost evil (for not letting her daughter go to a party and for forcing her to clean her room and watch her brother's basketball game).  Alice (the daughter) called her mom an idiot and they got a little physical.  In the end, they do make it right where Alice listens to her mom and her mom lets her friends come over to study.  Still, there was something unsettling about it all.  I think a lot of it went over the younger ones' heads.


We all made it back to school safely.  And now I need to decide whether I'm going to go on my weekly grocery/library run or if I'm going to hold off...

Same old, same old

Not too much out of the ordinary happening today...


The books I ordered over Christmas break arrived; my students were really excited to see what they were.  One of them (I think I'll call him the Book Monster) immediately wanted to tuck one away in his desk so he could read it...


Then the other students were complaining there weren't any good picture books to read.  I think they're forgetting about the three crates of picture books that are on the floor for them to peruse. 


We ran out of scotch tape in our classroom.  I still haven't made my way to the office to get some more. 


This is the first full week of school in over a month.  I think it's going to be a long one.  But this Friday is the end of the quarter which means... no school on Monday!


Tomorrow the whole school is trekking over to Nicollet to see a play performed by MSU theater students.  It's usually on an anti-bullying topic, so it should be pretty good.


Staff meeting, PTL, cheer practice, home games, end of the quarter... this is my only free night of the school week, so I guess I should make the most of it!

What an ending!

Whoa.  What an end to the week.


My students were a little quieter today, but not by much.  Memory work went a little better than I was expecting.  One student didn't get any of hers said (although she was at school a half an hour early) and one student said half of hers before the bell rang.  Their handwriting memory work turned out a lot better than I expected.  Since our memory work is getting longer and more complicated, I created a new assignment: each week the 5th graders have to write out their memory work in cursive and hand it in.  Only one student put up much of a fuss.  She had to stay in from recess to work on her handwriting and man was she bummed!  She missed out on Reading Buddies because she had to say her memory work still and then she missed out on our Circular Story game because her handwriting wasn't finished.  She couldn't concentrate at her desk, so I tried moving her to the table where the rest of the class was.  She wrote two words.  So I sent her to the gym with Ms. J.  She kept changing seats and didn't get much accomplished.  Finally, right before lunch, I told her that I was giving her one last chance to clean up her act; if not, I would be calling her mom to come pick her up. 


So I spent my noon recess calling her mom, giving her a warning that this might happen, finding out that her mom just put her daycare kids down for a nap and wouldn't be able to come get her daughter, trying to figure out other options... after much running around and deliberation, it was decided that Ms. J would run her home if she made poor choices during math. 


I was never happier to see a student come walking into my classroom.  Okay, I admit, part of me wanted her to get sent home so she knows not to mess with us, but I was still glad she came back.  The rest of the day she paid attention and took good notes... she dragged her feet a little when it was time for her to leave at the end of the day. 


In other news, the science experiment went well (thanks for the rocks Dad!).  There was some general complaining about the assigned groups but everyone got settled down and got to work (I used a random group generator so I didn't even pick the groups).  The lab was about ocean currents.  I had a 9x13 pan for each group.  They put two rocks in as continents and then added water.  Four colors of food coloring were added to the corners.  Then they put an ice cube in one corner and noted how temperature change can start a current.  Then they used a straw to add wind and really noticed that wind effects currents.  So that was the lab. 


The 5th graders ended their day by listening to the last two solar system powerpoints, cleaning/organizing their desks and the classroom, and then we had time for a little bit of recess.


Oh!  I remember a story from the basketball game last night... the third and fourth graders at the game were running all over the place.  Nothing unusual there.  All of a sudden, they came rushing over to Mrs. E and I all out of breath, "Someone wrote all over our SMARTboard!"  Oh they were beyond distraught!  The first thing I wanted to know was if the person had used the SMARTboard pen or if he had used a regular dry erase marker.  It turned out to be the latter.  They said it looked like the person had tried to erase it and it just smeared the marks even more.  Mr. D was already long gone for the day (and Mrs. E doesn't have a SMARTboard), so I was the one to go swooping in to the rescue... or at least to take a look at the problem.


There were red marks all over the board.  It looked like the opposite team's coach had written some plays on the board and then tried to erase them.  About five or six 3rd and 4th graders were buzzing around the room, ready for blood.  Speaking as calmly as I could, I asked the most upset kid to make a sign to put on the board.  Then I asked another to go get some paper towels and another for the whiteboard cleaner.  Together we got the board cleaned off and it look almost as good as new. 


I still don't know if they told Mr. D or not.  I imagine they did, but I didn't hear anything about it from him.  And I think if they had told him, he would've brought it up at some point today.  Anyway, no permanent harm was done.


And now we have another two days off from school!  Yay for the weekend!

What a horrible teacher!

*Miss Heintz sheepishly raising her hand* Yep, that would be me.


UGH! I am so disappointed in myself!  Twice today I forgot the same student!


In social studies, the other three got to read aloud from the book.  I specifically told the last student he'd get to read; I wasn't going to forget him.  Then what happened?  We got so sucked in to Mount Vernon (the virtual field trip) there wasn't time to read from the book and he didn't get to read.


THEN, at the end of the day, we went around and did our highs and lows.  I completely skipped over him!  No one said anything until we were dismissed and in the hallway.  Oh I felt so bad!  When I saw him next, I told him he could say 2 highs and lows since I skipped him, but he said not to worry about it.  I still felt horrible.


There's a basketball game coming up in about 30 minutes, so 3/4ths of my class stuck around after school.  They all wanted to hang out in the classroom, but I told them they had to go to the 7/8th grade room like normal otherwise I wouldn't get anything done. 


The boy that I forgot came back in to grab something to work on and he asked me, "Since you forgot about my highs and lows, could I maybe say my memory work in three parts instead of just two?"  (this week is the first article and meaning... very long)  I suppose it's only fair.  So he hung out in the room memorizing his memory work.  Did I get a lot done?  No.  Did I feel better about forgetting him?  Yes. 


He kept thinking of youtube videos for me to look up so we'd have more videos to watch at the end of the day.  Sigh.  Youtube is a weakness of mine.  Today we watched "dancing to an ipod in public, Christmas edition".  He did get all his memory work said and I still have a little time before the game (and our first cheerleading event) to get things done for tomorrow.

Sore Throat

After a nice, long Christmas break, we hopped right back into the action today.  (Monday and Tuesday school was cancelled because of the cold).  Actually, I think this morning was just as cold as it was on Tuesday, but oh well.


I guess my voice got used to not talking as much; my throat feels sore and worn out!  Cheer leading practice after school today didn't help matters.  Those little girls are so excited!  We cheer at our first game tomorrow.


There's a new fad going around.  One of my students made me a necklace out of these little colorful band things.  I guess they come in a kit and you can make bracelets or rings or necklaces...  The student asked me to wear the necklace today so I put it on over my scarf.  One of the eight grade girls said she got a kit like that for Christmas and then at cheer leading, two or three little girls said they had a kit too!  And then they wanted to know who made it and how she made it and how she got it to be so long... whew!  Who knew little bands of rubber could cause so much excitement?


I finally bought my ticket to El Salvador.  The trip is through ThriventBuilds (I think this trip is also associated with Habitat for Humanity).  I'm going to fly out of the Cities on July 12th and arrive at noon in San Salvador.  I'll help build houses for about a week (with a team of 10-15 other people) and then fly back to the US on the 20th. 


Other than that, not too much else is new.  Joe has buried himself and probably won't resurface for another week or two.  This morning I stuck a water bottle full of hot water in his tub so he wouldn't get so cold.  He really must not like traveling.