Monday, October 17, 2016

Lots of Little Crabs

Sigh, unfortunately, I'm not talking about the little critters with pincers... I'm talking about all the students (and quite a few teachers... ahem... me) at school today...

This weekend was the big Pork Chop Dinner and Silent Auction for our school.  There was a pretty constant stream of parents texting me/calling me on Saturday asking questions about the Pork Chop Dinner.  When do I work? Is school unlocked? Where are the extra tickets? Can someone come pick up my silent auction donation?

But everything went fine on Sunday.  I had some more early morning phone calls/texts, and some last-minute silent auction donations.  All my bell players showed up! Hallelujah! And we sounded mostly decent... I caught a few mess-ups; hopefully they were minor enough the congregation didn't notice.  After church I supervised the silent auction room.  No one came to relieve me, so I had to wait to eat lunch until after the auction.  All but one of the items sold, bringing in somewhere around $1500 for the auction side of things.  A bunch of people wanted to pick up/pay for things at school this week, so all those items had to be loaded in my car and transferred to my classroom.  A few people picked their items up at school.  Still a few more to go.  I think everyone is still recuperating from the big weekend.

After school today we had our last volleyball practice.  One of the coaches came up with a cool volleyball game for the girls to play (since we have one last game tomorrow and that's it). But the girls were all crabbing at each other; one girl even started crying.  Then another girl tripped going up the bleachers during a water break and spilled another girl's water bottle all over her... causing the wet girl to cry too.  Sigh. It was a long practice.

And then after practice we had our end of the year volleyball party at Swany's.  We had told the girls to bring $5 for pizza.  When we pooled the money, we had just enough to cover the bill! Whew!  I didn't actually eat any pizza. By the time I got there (after quickly packing up my stuff at school), most of the pizza was gone and I figured I should leave it for the girls.  They finished eating before 5:00, so we sat around for a half an hour (well, the girls were giggling and talking and playing obo-shen-a-ten-ta-ten and getting suckers from the counter and... you get the picture) waiting for parents to come pick their girls up.  But I think the girls had fun, which is the important thing.  Only one more volleyball thing to go! Woohoo!

We started our testing today. Instead of IOWA tests, we're doing Fast Bridge testing, which we'll do three times a year so we can actually monitor our students' progress and do something about it if they need help in areas.  I had been planning to wait a bit before doing the testing, but when I explained how it worked, they wanted to do it today. So we took the reading test.  They did all right.  Two were in the at-risk category.  The rest were in the middle to high somewhat at risk level.  The other nice thing about this test is that it tells you the specific skills the students are struggling with.  My class, across the board, struggles with homophones, end punctuation, context clues, analogies, and comparing characters.  Some of that is no surprise; we haven't learned it yet or it's something that they've been struggling with so far this year.  Some of it is a little surprising. I'll be interested to see how they do on the math portion we take tomorrow.  But at least now I have an idea of some of the things we need to work on!

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