Wrecking the Pavement

I'm beginning to think I should not be allowed on the asphalt parking lot at school.  Last year we needed to spray paint our Mother's Day presents... and you can still see the outlines of our projects on the pavement.  Then today the 7th graders were learning how to classify minerals... this particular instance involves Moh's scale of hardness.  Yes, I did tell the ab joke... "On Moh's scale of hardness, talc is the softest (a one) and a diamond is the hardest (a ten).  My abs are an 11."  They looked at me like they were thinking, "Miss H, why are you implying that you have abs? Clearly you do not."  Then one of the 7th graders said, "no, an 11 is the strength of MY abs." And everyone laughed and it was all good.  But back to the pavement predicament... I had a rock out to use as an example to find the hardness, but we didn't have anything to scrape against it that we knew the hardness of... and someone came up with the brilliant idea to scrape the rocks on the parking lot.  So we trekked outside where each of the 7th graders fished a rock from the landscaping.  Pretty soon they're scraping away at the pavement.  Let's just say most of the rocks we picked up were harder than the pavement.  Now there are all sorts of shapes and letters scratched into the area outside my classroom.  Oops. 


Today was also an insect kind of day.  I got a call before school from a student's mom asking if she could have a monarch caterpillar dropped off at school since it was getting ready to form a chrysalis.  Sure, why not?  So all day that particular student has been popping off to the lab table to see if it has begun formation.  He even brought it outside during recess.  Nothing's going on yet!  It'll probably do its thing overnight. 


Also at noon recess, a gigantic bumblebee landed on my leg and crawled higher and higher, its tongue flicking out searching for something to eat.  It was the biggest bee I've ever seen!  I had an empty applesauce container in my hand and I positioned it in such a way the bee would get at the applesauce.  Pretty soon it was hanging out inside licking up a storm.  My little caterpillar watcher ran inside to grab his tablet so he could take a picture.  We didn't have cords to get the picture off the device, but I took a picture of the picture and here it is...




And that's pretty much all the excitement from the day.  Miss N's sister came down to visit her (my friend Jonni from Bethany), so we chatted for a bit after the kids left.  I'm getting ready to head to our volleyball game in Mankato.  We play around 5ish, so I'll probably skip the soccer game and just go straight to volleyball.  My kids will tell me all about the game tomorrow anyway.