Happy Birthday

One of the 5th graders had a birthday today.  His mom dropped off a cake this morning.  At lunch, his sister asked if there was any cake left... probably hoping she'd get some of the leftovers... with 15 kids plus 5 teachers, there wasn't any cake to spare.  We cleaned the plate!  The boys in my class, tricksters they are, decided it would be funny to pretend it was not this kid's birthday and to say nothing about it at all the whole day.  That would've been fine, but then they started saying stuff like, "Hey [other student], isn't it your birthday today?" "Nope, it's not mine."  "Well, [another student] isn't it your birthday?" "Nope."  When the birthday boy said, "It's my birthday!"  The ringleader said, "No, I'm pretty sure your birthday is December 2nd.  It's not yours today."  Yeah, the birthday boy didn't get the joke.  So I put the kibosh on that. 


Our NaNo kickoff went pretty well today.  Yesterday I wrote about 800 words of my own story.  I think I'm going to go with the teacher goal of 30,000 words.  That means I only write 1,000 a day, which I think is doable.  For those of you who don't know, I've been doing some freelance writing on the side lately.  The guy who hired me has a new assignment: to write a manual on exercising training from his 90 page outline.  Basically I have to put his words into paragraph format.  Not super difficult, just time consuming.  Add that on to school work and NaNo... I'm a busy girl. 


But back to my kiddos!  My top writer last year started his yesterday and he coincidentally also has 800 words.  Or he did at the start of the day.  He wrote more during Daily 5 this morning.  I've got some catching up to do!  Some kids now have 300 words, others have 50 or 80.  All have something!  One kid had typed about 300 words and logged off his computer.  He thought he'd saved it, but when he logged on later, he couldn't find it!  He had to start over.  Bummer.


Oh, other good news! The seeds are sprouting!  The sunflowers have grown the most so far, beans next, then peas/corn.  My kiddos were so excited to see the sprouts.  I need to remember to have them examine the roots/leaflets for geotropism or the other tropisms.  Tomorrow perhaps.