VIP Day

Of course I come down with a cold right before VIP Day!  My ears aren't quite as pluggy as they were yesterday, but my nose has been stuffed up all day.  Between my students and me, we've gone though a whole Kleenex box!  I had two boys out sick today... tis the season I guess.


We had a large number of Very Important People visit our classroom this morning; it was standing room only!  We started our day normally and I finished up the religion lessons we didn't quite finish last Friday.  Then we did Pictionary! Only one VIP got up in front to draw.  Donuts in the gym afterward went well.  The 7th graders served each table.  It was a little tricky finding room for everyone... a new attendance record was set this year... 131!  Our enrollment this year is around 62, so we had a lot of guests!  I never know where to sit at these things, so I usually stand awkwardly on one end of the gym until everyone is done eating or I finally pick a spot to sit.  This year enough people talked to me that I never had to pick a spot. Of course then I didn't have firsthand access to the donuts... though I did sneak one out of the extras left in the kitchen.


Our entertainment for the morning was the Zoomobile, a program run by the Minnesota zoo.  The speaker was super good! He was funny and interesting and he showed us lots of animals.  I was expecting cute and cuddly, exotic animals, but we got some creepy crawlies and Minnesota animals instead.  He showed us hissing cockroaches, a possum, a red-tailed hawk, and a ball python.  The kids got to pet the python at the end.  That was a hit with the kids! The adults... not so much.


The rest of the day flew by! More people dropped off Silent Auction stuff (we're running out of room in the closet! I need to reorganize!), the 7th graders worked on their powerpoints (we're getting to the really good part in our read aloud book), my class did Presidential Physical Fitness tests in PE. 


We're still learning about plants in 5/6th science, and today we did a mini-quiz on the four tropisms of plants.  Then they remembered I was supposed to show them a video of sunflowers turning toward the sun.  So we looked it up and couldn't quite find a video that showed us what we wanted.  So we looked up another one, and another one, and another one.  And then I wondered how they harvest sunflowers... turns out they use a modified combine to cut the heads off.  The seeds are shipped to three plants in America where most of them are turned into snacks/bird feed.  About a third is sent to an oil processing plant to become sunflower oil.  All this from 3 million acres of sunflowers.  Pretty cool.