Christmas Presents

Only two kids are not to their goals yet! And both of them are above 95% finished.  Hopefully they write tonight!  The kid who was sick yesterday did write a little at home.  I typed for him this morning until he had 20 words to go, then I made him type so he could get that sense of accomplishment in typing the final words.  He was excited.

I myself have finished my book... I ended my story at 30,911 words, 911 over my goal.  My students were impressed I wrote 3,000 words last night.  I really wanted to finish the story!  Now I have time to catch up on things... like doing dishes, and reading, and making Christmas presents.

Speaking of Christmas presents... over Thanksgiving break I learned how to make those yarn-covered metal hangers.  Perhaps a good parent Christmas present? I also have a big block of white candle wax in one of the cupboards at school.  Decorative candles as a present?  I had my students vote and 9/10 picked the candle.  The one boy who voted for the hanger said that his grandma has a ton of them so he thought she would like one.  I told him he could bring in metal hangers and I'd teach him how to do it.  So far he hasn't taken me up on the offer.

So we're going to make candles for Christmas.  Mrs. B has baby food jars we can have.  I just need to buy some fragrances and wicks.  Otherwise I have fabric paint (to decorate the outsides), food coloring, and wax.  Mrs. B was wondering if the wax was the right kind to make candles, so I checked today and the wax I have is labeled candle wax. We should be good to go!

99%

Only four more students need to win NaNo! (Plus me).  We are at 99% of our word goal! Some students who've already won are continuing to write since they aren't finished with their stories.  The good news is that the NaNo site will stay up and running all year so they can keep typing on there.

A few who finished wanted to start editing right away (and adding pictures).  The YWP site has a place where you can download a copy of your novel, but it's in a .pdf format so it's not editable.  We started by copying and pasting everything from the .pdf, but the formatting transferred weird, resulting in a lot of work deleting extra spaces, etc. So now I'm having them copy and paste each chapter individually into a Word document. Way easier than it sounds.

I was going to have them wait until January to edit their stories, but they're still excited about them, so maybe I won't wait.  Maybe we'll take a week off and then I'll show them some tools in Microsoft Word to edit.  They're already collecting pictures to use for their book covers.  The site I mentioned in an earlier post has cover-making capabilities, but I checked it out today and it seems more complicated than CreateSpace (the site NaNo used to use).  I read some of the forums for educators on the YWP site and other teachers said they're still using CreateSpace because it wasn't that expensive.  So I took a look at it again, and it turns out if the books are in black and white (aside from the cover), the prices are comparable to The Book Patch.  My new plan is to use CreateSpace and have my kiddos create covers for their books through the site.  That way they can have a say in what their covers look like (plus it's less work for me!).

NaNo Update

Only two days left in November... my class is 94% to our goal of 87,500 words written (we're at 82,719 as of now).  I have only 3,000 words to go on my own NaNo story; I hope to finish the story by tomorrow night.  So far, five of my ten students have reached their goals and won!  Some of the winners are still writing too! I was pleasantly surprised at how many wrote over Thanksgiving break.  The boy who accidentally/on purpose deleted his story was one of the people who wrote, and he made his goal!!! Here's what he posted in our online message board; it's too sweet not to share. "made it to my word goal i'm happy i thought i would never get it but the main thing is never give up" Teacher win!

One sad thing is that NaNo is not offering a free hard copy of each winner's story.  In the past they've given out codes and I've published my kiddos' books for them.  Now they're not, but I promised my kids that I'd publish their books for them.  I did a quick online search after school for cheap, self-publishing sites and I did find one that seems relatively inexpensive... The Book Patch, $2.88 per 60pg book.  That makes me feel much better about the project.  I think that will be my Christmas present to my students this year, a coupon for a printed version of their books.

A former student stopped in today after school to get help on a writing assignment.  She has to write a gothic/creepy/horror story for her American Literature class and she wanted help outlining it.  The teacher had given her what I like to call a "plot roller coaster" worksheet with spaces for the exposition, rising action, climax, etc.  Her idea was that a nurse in a hospital is murdering people.  It took about an hour, but now she has an outline plus some detailed character notes.  The janitor is going to discover her "crime room" and then disappears, never to be found again... dun, dun, dun.  I'm glad I don't have to write that story!

We started writing letters to our Slovakian pen pals today.  I'm a little worried I'm overwhelming my students with letter writing. But they got pretty excited about these letters, so I hope that excitement keeps up.  I was spurred into action by an email I saw this morning from one of the Slovakian teachers.  She wanted to know if I'd seen her previous email.  Oops, I thought I'd responded to that one... she sent it almost two weeks ago... Since we were on Thanksgiving break, I didn't see the email asking if I'd gotten the first email for a few days.  Sigh.  But now I've responded so we should be all right.

I always feel like I'm cheating a little at the pen pal thing.  My kids are fluent in English, so they can just whip out a letter in a few days, or even a day.  Our pen pals have been working on their letters all month! And putting a ton of time and effort into them.

A bunch of my book orders came in today. Yay new books! I have to be careful not to hog them all.  Lots of them are good read-aloud picture books, so I want to keep them and do them one by one.  But then I get books from the library, so we read those first and the bought books stay tucked away on the shelf.  I should let my students enjoy the books instead of hogging them on the shelves!  Oh well, I guess it's a good incentive for me to keep my act together on using read-alouds to teach skills.

Time for me to wrap up and get out of here.  My plan for tonight: run errands, pick up some more NaNo prizes, and get home and write!

Rainy Day Blues

Another antsy day for both my class and me.  To top it off, it rained all day and the temp is hovering at the 34 degree mark.

We had a mixed up morning because of the CropLife speaker who came.  He wanted to do his presentation for both the 7th/8th graders and 5th/6th graders, so Mr. E and I had to do some schedule finagling so the speaker didn't have to hang out at school doing nothing for too long.

Our guy works for Bayer CropScience and is from Tennessee, but he travels all over for his job.  He has been to all 50 states and quite a few countries too.  He was pretty interesting! He showed us pictures of different (nontraditional) crops and had us guess what they were.  We also got to see some videos of drones, how a planter works, and a new driverless tractor Case is coming out with.  You can run it with a program on your iPad, and it will send you alerts if something is wrong... I don't know if I'd trust a tractor to work all by itself.  But the video makes it look pretty cool!  Check it out here.

The 7th and 8th graders didn't have as many questions as the 5th and 6th graders, but they were still a respectful audience.  After his presentation was over, we took our spelling tests and then had recess until lunch time.  My 5th and 6th graders had math in the morning and then we did Daily 5 in the afternoon.  For some reason, the internet was super slow, which made NaNo writing more complicated.  Not many words were written today.  Everyone else was hard to settle and kept distracting each other.  I had a headache, so I kind of felt like punting the afternoon.  However, we did make it through our Daily 5 choices, I got the book orders ordered, and we finished the day with Christmas Program Practice.  That went well; we even had time to start learning one of the songs.

Now I'm all packed up, ready to go... all I have to do is feed Joe.  Then on to Thanksgiving break!

Two Days

We only have two days of school this week and I am antsy for them to be over.  I love school, don't get me wrong, but knowing that there are family celebrations ahead gets me excited and I want to skip ahead!

My kiddos were pretty antsy today too.  Not quite as bad as last week's full moon/potential blizzard weather though.  No spelling or memory work or handwriting this week since it's short, so their whole focus can be on their NaNos.  Most are right on track! Quite a few wrote a bit over the weekend.  My NaNo is on track too, although I don't think much writing will get done tonight.  It's my farmer's birthday today and I'm heading down to Truman after school to celebrate.

We started Christmas Program Practice today.  We made it halfway through the program, which was expected.  Tomorrow we'll do the other half.  It's coming along!

No School?

That was the question of the day from my kids.  Oh those weather people! Filling my students' heads with dreams of a cancelled day of school.  "Sleepy Eye called off school early! What if New Ulm does? Do we get to go home early?" Guys, they're not calling school off early.  We're only getting rain. "LOOK! IT'S SNOWING!" Okay, but look, it's not sticking. "THEY'RE GOING TO CALL SCHOOL OFF!" No, really, it's not that bad out there.  We're having school until the end of the day. "THEY'RE GOING TO CALL SCHOOL OFF!"

So that was my morning.

Our religion lesson was about Aaron and Hur holding up Moses' hands while Joshua battled the Amalekites (Exodus 17, I believe, if you want to check it out for yourselves).  My kiddos wanted to see what it was like to hold their arms up in the air for as long as they could (okay, I did challenge them).  They kept them up the rest of religion and into read-aloud time.  One by one they dropped their arms; they couldn't keep them up anymore.  But three of the 6th graders were in it to win it.  They kept their arms up to get a drink in the hallway (Mr. E noticed), and tried to eat snack with no hands (theirs were still up in the air!). Then they wanted to work on their handwriting (due today) that they hadn't finished yet.  But that's kind of hard to accomplish with hands in the air.

They were pretty creative coming up with solutions... one girl tried having a classmate hold her handwriting book above her head so she could still write with her hands in the air.  That didn't work too well.  Someone else suggested lying on her tummy so she could still keep her hands up, but the book could lie on the floor.  The boys came up with the best solution; they laid on their backs under a table and held their handwriting pages up on the bottom of the table so their hands would still be in the air, but they could still see what they were doing.  They lasted that way for about a half an hour.  They would've kept going, but they were distracting their classmates too much, so I made them quit.  They were all supposed to drop their hands at the same time so there wouldn't be one winner, but the boys kept their hands up even after I said to drop, so the 6th grade girl 'lost'.  But everyone said the boys were cheating and it didn't count.  After that the boys went to get a drink again and I saw them stick their hands back in the air, still trying to outdo each other... oh boy.

Well, I suppose I should get out of here.  It's still snowing a little and the wind is pretty gusty.  30-50mph winds this afternoon.  So far it's becoming slush and not ice.  But 4:00 is when the temperature is supposed to dip, and I probably should get home sooner rather than later.  I have a pretty lazy weekend planned: write lots of words on my NaNo (I'm still behind by 600 words), read books, watch movies (the Bookmobile had a bunch of new-ish ones!).  Sunday we play bells and sing in church.  That's about it!

Survivor

The things my kiddos talk about at lunchtime always amazes me.  Today I was only partly paying attention when I tuned in to two 5th graders in a heated dialogue about Adam and John.  Something about one of the guys hiding food and eating it later and him being so much stronger.  But they thought he was being dumb and they really though the other guy was right... It took me a minute to realize they were talking about the TV show Survivor.  Man, they get into that show!

Have I ever mentioned my student who lost his entire NaNo? He had been typing it in Microsoft Word and I wanted him to upload it to the NaNo website so his stats/word count would go towards our whole goal. He copied and pasted his story onto the site and then decided to delete from the Microsoft Word document.  Uh, okay, if you really want to... After he put it on the website, I checked our class page to see how much his words affected our class total.  The site showed he still had zero words.  So I told him to save it.  And he did, but my computer still showed he'd written zero.  He was adamant that it saved, so I said okay, and left it at that.

It turns out, it hadn't saved.  So all his 800 words were gone.  And since he'd deleted the words from his Word document, they truly were gone; we couldn't undo the deleting.  I called the IT guys a few times to see if they could recover it, but they couldn't find a backup.  This poor kid had lost all will to write now that his words were gone.  I talked to his mom after basketball practice last night to see if he could write at home so he could meet his 3,000 word goal by the end of the month.  Sounds like a plan!

Today I offered to type while he dictated and he now has 743 words! His will to write is back!  I talked to a bunch of parents tonight at conferences about letting their kids have writing time over Thanksgiving break especially, just so we meet our goals.  I love NaNoWriMo, but I will definitely be glad when November is over.  I must admit, I'm behind on my goal.  I didn't write any words last night, so tonight I need to write about 1900.

I only have two more conferences left.  They've gone well so far!  I've stayed pretty close to my schedule; there were only two or three I went over by a little bit.  But I had empty slots sprinkled around the schedule and was able to get back on track.  The PTL fed us tonight too: ham sandwiches, chips/salsa, vegetables/dip, and cracker bars for dessert.  Mmm, mmm, mmm!  And I actually had time to eat tonight too!

Outside

Word on the street says there might be a blizzard here Friday.  We're supposed to get less than a half an inch, but it's going to be windy... and I still don't have any plastic over my porch screens! Oh well, I suppose I'll survive.  It's not supposed to get below freezing Friday until about 4:00, so it might come as rain.  The kids were all like, "Wait! Blizzard? No school Friday???"

We have our road back! Actually, last Friday they took down the detour and now we are back to minimal traffic outside school.  Since the weather was good today, we had chapel at church and walked there and back.

Once chapel was over, we had music practice (we're singing on Sunday) and then we packed Operation Christmas Child boxes.  We had enough stuff to pack 63 boxes!  Each kid got to pack at least one.  Oh we put some good presents in there!  I wish I could be there to see the recipients' faces when they open the boxes.  All 63 boxes ended up in the back of Miss S's van; she'll drop them off in New Ulm at the pickup site before Friday.

Since this was probably the last nice day of the year, we went outside for recess.  They've been playing GaGa Ball and the competition is fierce.  I usually have to referee or there's lots of shouting about "I'm not out! It didn't touch me!"  One 8th grade girl was talking or something, she had her mouth wide open, and the ball bounced in her face.  She got a huge mouthful of rubber kickball!  If you've ever been around kickballs, you know the rubber smells gross.  If you touch it with your hands, your hands smell gross afterwards.  And if you are unfortunate enough to forget that fact and accidentally lick your hand, you forever regret that awful taste in your mouth.  This poor girl.  Her entire tongue licked that ball.  It bounced away as if nothing had happened.  But moments later (if you looked closely), you could see a little brown oval on the ball where her 'licking' picked up dirt from the floor of the GaGa pit.  Eww. Disgusting.

Family Write Night

Today had some unplanned moments.  Last night, after I was done at school my low tire pressure light went on as I left.  Lovely.  It was late, I was tired, and I still had a bunch of errands to run.  New Ulm is the closest place to fill up with air, so I went to town and pumped up the tire.  Then I ran errands and tested the tire before I went home.  It was slightly lower and I worried I'd have a flat tire in the morning.

My plan was to, in the morning right after I got up, check the psi in my finicky tire.  If it were flat, I would call Pastor to see if he could help me put the spare on.  This morning, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it had only gone down about 5psi. Which gave me enough to air to get to school, but I'd need to get it fixed sooner rather than later.  Normally I could go after school, but tonight was the Family Writing Night, hosted by me in my classroom until 7:00.  By then all the tire places would be closed.

Here's how my problem got solved: Once I got to school, I called the tire place and made an appointment for 2:15.  Miss F (preschool and Title teacher) would watch my class at afternoon recess and dismiss them at the end of the day while I got my tire fixed.  Hopefully it would only take a half an hour to fix, and I'd be back to school by 3:00 when the event started.

It happened pretty much like that, except it took an hour to fix.  So I was a half an hour late to the write-in.  Thankfully, other teachers were helping, so they got things set up (my kids arranged the room with Miss F before they left for the day).  By the time I got there, there were about 20 people writing and playing story games.  It was super fun! Lots of families came and wrote and told stories together.  Kids were sharing their writing with each other and writing letters to each other (or to other friends who hadn't come).  One NaNoer came and one family from Nicollet came; the rest were families from ILS.  Mr. D got some good pictures for the paper/yearbook/projectors at church.

We only had one pizza left over (and a few carrots and pretzels).  So good guessing on my part! One of the moms cleaned the leftovers up for me; we'll eat them at snack tomorrow.  There are still 10 minutes to go for Writing Night, but the last people just left (and my laptop is dying), so I think I'm going to head home even though my classroom is kind of a mess... my kiddos can clean it up tomorrow morning.

All in all, I'd say our first writing night was a smashing success!

Electoral College

We were supposed to do MN history today.  And we sort of did in a round about way.  Instead of talking about Minnesota's boom in population and how it became a state (something that got pushed off until tomorrow), we talked about the election.

It was a pretty deep discussion.  We talked about popular vote, the electoral college (and watched this cool video explaining it), the presidential election results by county in MN, protesters, our Constitutional right to protest, what is legal and illegal about that, concession/victory speeches, and a whole bunch of other stuff I've forgotten.

The 7th and 8th graders went to Drug Court today.  Every year they visit the court system and sit in on parole hearings for people who've had trouble with drugs (at least I think that's what they go see... I've never gone).  They were all abuzz when they came back because a girl who checked in actually confessed to using drugs and admitted that her boyfriend was back in her apartment also using.  So they arrested her and were going to plan a sting to arrest her boyfriend too.  Wow!  One of the 8th graders said she confessed because they always do a drug test on them and last week her's came back positive, so she knew they were going to catch her if she said no again.  So she just confessed.  And got arrested.  Usually they get to talk to some of the people and ask questions. I'm not sure if that happened this year or not.

Since they were gone all afternoon, I had extra time with my 5th and 6th graders.  They skipped math and bells today and we just did art for an hour.  We're doing this project where they cut out silhouettes and put the background on a page and the silhouette on another page, both pages having been painted to look like sunsets or something else colorful.  They are turning out pretty good! Mostly we have to wait for paint to dry now.  They were fussing because it was too much work or too hard to cut out all the intricate little details on the silhouettes they picked.  Most wanted to use box-cutters to cut them out because they though a scissors would be too difficult.  I thought it would be tougher with a box-cutter, but hey, it's their art project.

Whew, my brain is mush.  They were off the wall today! Getting in each other's faces and making mean/rude comments.  We didn't even get to vote on our class prize today because they were so rude and distracted this morning.  Hopefully tomorrow will be better.  I think I'm missing the supermoon.  I wanted to watch it rise, but I was still stuck inside at school and I just thought of it now (or I would've poked my head outside to see it).  I'm sure it won't be as big as at moonrise, but it will hopefully still look bigger than normal!

I need to run errands in New Ulm tonight. We have our family writing night tomorrow and I need to pick up pizza and other supplies (markers, paper, stickers, etc.).  I hope we're ready! I feel like I haven't done enough planning, but it doesn't really need all that much.  We expect about 25-30 people to show up tomorrow.  Let's hope I ordered enough pizza!

Veteran's Day

The Veteran's Day program at Nicollet was really good. The high school band was phenomenal; it made me miss band and wish our students at ILS could participate in band.  The main speaker was a bit long-winded and a lot of what he talked about was over my students' heads, but he was still good.  He went on for a bit about many of the threats and dangers America faces from nations overseas (and cyber threats too).  It was very sobering.  He also said the US is preparing for offensive cyber attacks to retaliate against countries who have already attacked us through cyber means.  Yikes!  That came towards the end of his speech; it's too bad it didn't end on a happier note.  He did leave students and community members with some life tips, mostly things like eat healthy, get exercise, do stuff besides video games, etc.  One thing that impressed me (and surprised me a little, but not a lot) is that Minnesota military men have a great reputation around the world for being great people, hard workers, good to be around, and good overall soldiers.  Our speaker said that's because of the communities we have in the Midwest and the work ethic we grow up learning (especially from our farming families).

On a completely different note, earlier this morning I had read an article about flexible seating options in classrooms.  What that means is that students can sit on things besides chairs, things like: exercise balls, wobble chairs, stools, beanbags, cushions, etc. This is to keep them from having their chair legs off the floor (something my class struggles with A LOT) and to give them a way to fidget and use up energy without distracting the class.  My students LOVED this idea.  They thought we should buy exercise balls right now and have them at school on Monday.  When I said we would need to get funding for the project, a whole bunch of them remembered they had exercise balls at home, could they just bring those? Nearly 90% of the class had some at home they thought they could bring!  Still, I thought it would be better to check with Mr. E about it.  I gave them a weekend assignment to sit on their exercise balls and work for 15 minutes on something... reading, writing NaNo, whatever.  Just try to get a feel for it if they like it and can work like that or not.  I'm curious to see how many remember to do it (and how many can actually work like that).

After school I brought it up with the other teachers and it turns out they've been curious about it too! One teacher was thinking about doing a Thrivent Grant for it.  She'd have a parental education night about how important motion is throughout the day and then use the Thrivent money to buy stools/balls/chairs for her preschoolers.  I think it's a great idea!  Mr. E said he'd check with the school board at their next meeting and see what they think about it.  So we need to hold off on bringing the exercise balls to school for now.

My LuLaRoe party went well last night. It was fun having my sisters around, and it was fun having the teachers from school over for a non-school event (even though we did talk about school stuff a little).  Not too many other people showed up, just a friend from my college days, and she had to run off for a meeting in Mankato.  But such is life! It was still a fun time with the people who were there... something different to do besides correct papers and lesson plan!

Erlenmeyer Flasks

We had fun in 5th and 6th chemistry today.  We were learning about concentrations and titrations and acid-base neutralization, and I explained it pretty well if I do say so myself.

I had a picture on the "concentrations" page of a bunch of glasses with red liquid going from dark to light.  They wondered how you could do something like that.  Huh. I started to explain about food coloring and concentration, and then I thought, maybe I should just show them! I had food coloring in the closet and a bunch of water in an ice cream pail (not used in another lab).  So we did an impromptu demonstration at the lab table.  They wanted to swirl the food coloring in the beakers, but the water kind of sloshed out.  So I grabbed an Erlenmeyer flask from the closet and then the ALL wanted to try swirling.  And dumping liquids in it.  I must say, it is a pretty neat piece of glassware.

Then we got to talking about neutralizations and why our stomachs need to be neutralized sometimes. Which led to a discussion about why we throw up when we get sick.  Which led to a discussion about why throats feel gross when throwing up.  Which led to a discussion about anorexia. Which led to a discussion about motion sickness.  Which led to a discussion on balancing.  Which resulted in us standing on one leg with our eyes open, and then closed.

Like I said.  It was a cool science class.

And we still had time for recess!

South America Speaker

Our guest speaker for South America was a little late today.  I had just pulled up a blank map on the board so we could practice the countries of South America for our map test tomorrow, when she came into our room.  So no practice time.

She was really good! Very personable, she's originally from Colorado, and is a junior at MLC going for a Spanish education major.  She taught for a year in Peru and also has spent time in Chile.  She showed us lots of pictures of her time in Peru; she traveled extensively and had many pictures of those tourist destinations.  Some of them were even places I'd already taught my kids about! The best part is, they recognized some of the locations!

The kids were so impressed they were gushing about the speaker when they went back to Mr. E's room.  He was so impressed by their being impressed, that he came to our room to tell the speaker how much his kids enjoyed her talk.

Unfortunately, she couldn't stay to talk to my class.  But she did leave her presentation up so I could go through it with the 5th and 6th graders.  She might come back another day to teach us about Chile.

We had PTL tonight.  It's finally over and I'm headed home! Tonight's late night makes up for tomorrow's early departure.  I'm having a LuLaRoe party at 4:30 tomorrow, so I need to leave school earlier than normal so I can get home and get things ready!

Mock Election

Our mock election was a success! It seemed like the other grades/teachers had fun voting... we even had a walk in visitor who voted (one of the class helpers stopped in to say hello and we recruited her to vote).  One kid went home sick today and didn't vote before he left.  Mr. E is the only other one who didn't vote; he was at a principal's meeting all afternoon.  I think I can catch him in his room now...

We need him to vote because it's a tie for favorite ice cream flavor: 23 chocolate, 23 vanilla.  There were 8 write-in votes: 5 cookie dough, 2 cookies and cream, 1 mint chip.  The presidential election for our school was a landslide: 42 Trump, 5 Clinton.  Again, we had 8 write-in votes: 4 Deez nuts, 1 Jill Stein, 1 Mom, 1 Gary Johnson, 1 Darrell Castle. Our results will be announced to the students tomorrow after chapel.

I'm going to keep this short since I want to get out of school early and vote!  I also have a check to drop off at the bank for my class, but the bank closes at 3:30... better get moving!

Fall Carnival

Today's carnival was a success! Everyone had fun and much candy was dispersed.

Lots of the younger grades wore costumes today, plus a bunch of teachers. Miss S tried to be Ms. Frizzle, but her dress was solid green and she had a scarf with it, so her kiddos thought she was Disgust from the movie Inside Out.  I went as Fern from Charlotte's Web; I wore a blue plaid button-up shirt, jeans, cowboy boots, my hair in braids, and carried a stuffed animal pig.  The 6th grade girls had brought fake clip-on spiders for their musical chair station, and they said I should borrow one to be Charlotte.  So I did! I clipped it right to my shirt.  That really helped sell the outfit.  I had the face painters paint me some freckles so I'd look even more like her.  Mr. D went as a "Ceiling Fan".  He wore sunglasses and carried around a camera (or maybe that was just to take pictures for the yearbook...) and a sign that said "Ceilings are the best! Go Ceilings! You rock!"  Get it? A fan of ceilings?  Mrs. E was gone today and her sub got the memo too late, so no costume there.

Her substitute was actually Miss N from last year! Her parents' church has their annual lutefisk dinner this weekend (another reason she was up in our area). All the lower grades were super excited to see her again.  It was good catching up with her during the fall carnival.

It is such a beautiful day outside.  I have everything packed up from school and my car is loaded with things I need this weekend... heading to Fulda! We get an extra day off because it's the end of the quarter.  I plan to get my grades done and do a lot of reading, writing, and baking!  My NaNo story is at 4700 words, so I'm a bit ahead.  I'm hoping to get even further ahead because next week will be a busy one.

Sunrise

This morning's sunrise was gorgeous.  I wouldn't have noticed (since it was still mostly dark when I got to school), but the school nurse bustled in all excited about 7:35 and asked if I had a minute. Sure!  She waved me over to the door and led me outside, gesturing to the fluffy pink clouds hovering to the east.  "Look what a beautiful day it is! Let's start the morning right!" And then she gave me a hug and practically waltzed back into the building.  I stood outside a few more moments, admiring the view, and then work called me back into my classroom.

I passed out BINGO prizes today.  The lab table was covered in prizes, and yet, only three kids earned bingos this quarter.  One got three, the rest got only one.  Some of the 5th graders didn't understand the concept that they had to have the books written down.  Many hadn't even looked at their bingo sheets since the first few weeks of school; they didn't remember which books they read way back then.  Proof they should write books in their Reading Notebooks as soon as they finish! Hopefully next quarter they'll be better about keeping up with that.

We tried the talking game again today... it wasn't a great success the second time around.  It started off fine; we did boys vs. girls.  They were neck and neck for a while, but then the boys kept forgetting and they were ahead by 50 words and they gave up and kept talking.  And everyone pointed fingers at each other and it was just kind of a mess.  So in between Daily 5 rounds, we had a discussion about what they liked from the quiet game and what they didn't like.  Everyone kind of said the same thing: they liked that the room was quiet, they didn't like the pointing fingers/blaming everyone. Where to go from here? They/we decided that (now that they know they can be quiet) they will be quiet during Daily 5 so everyone can concentrate.  If their voices get above a level three, a marble gets taken out of the jar.  If it gets above a level four, we play the talking game again.  Sounds fair to me!

The Chair Battle

Every day I'm always shoving in chairs.  It seems that every time I turn around, another chair has been pulled out and I have to push it in so no one trips over it!

It's probably because our desks are new this year, this time with separate desks/chairs unlike the previous model.  The students don't think to push their chairs in, but our walkways are so narrow, it's easy to trip if the chair is left in the wrong place.

We also have two folding tables surrounded by chairs.  My class will do small group stuff there, sometimes independent work throughout the rounds.  But that means different people are sitting in different places and they're still forgetting to push them in!  Sometimes, just to irritate each other, they'll tip their neighbor's chair on its end so the seat/back is touching the floor.

And the 7th and 8th graders, sigh, are no better when it comes to pushing in chairs.  But such is life.  I could have much worse problems in my room!

I set out my treasure trove of prizes today.  The end of the quarter is Friday and also the end of the first week of NaNo.  It's time to do BINGO prizes! Plus every 500 words in NaNo result in either a piece of candy or a medium to large prize.  We do these at the end of the week.  Some kiddos have been writing a ton! I still have two boys who haven't started yet. :(  One of them says he'll write a lot over the weekend.  Hopefully he's right!  He was having trouble focusing today.

One of the 6th graders thought we should do the "no talking game" today.  We played it last year, so you might remember the rules... you can only say three words, and can only speak when the teacher calls on you.  Normally we do boys vs. girls, but today they voted to do 5th vs. 6th.  End results: 5th=35, 6th= 19.  The morning was the biggest challenge.  After math, they'd gotten the hang of it and we didn't count the random blurting in the tally.  I must admit, I got sick of calling on them, thinking they had a question about the lesson, only to find they were actually tattling on their classmates.  They were honest today!  Many times I didn't hear them talk, but they admitted that they did say some words.  So that's good!

One 5th grade boy was having trouble remembering he wasn't supposed to talk.  He got maybe half the class's points.  The rest of his grade, one girl in particular, kept making snide comments to him about him being the worst at the game.  It was terrible!  I had a chat with her at lunch time.  Mr. E happened to be sitting right there too so we both confronted her on the issue.  She's supposed to be writing an apology note to him... hmm... I wonder if she ever got that done?  Another thing to add to the to do list!  Every time I think it's getting shorter, another five things gets added to the list.  Oh well.  Tomorrow's Thursday! And Thursdays are always good days.

Acids and Bases

Another lab today! Most of the kiddos remembered to bring a liquid from home.  The few that forgot scrounged around school until they found something that would work.  We ended up with: whiteboard cleaner, Lysol wipe liquid, disinfectant spray (from the janitor's closet), kitchen soap... pickle juice (x2), tea (my contribution), nail polish, Dr. Pepper, and lemon juice.  They had a lot of fun dipping litmus paper in their liquids! And they still had time for recess today too!

NaNo kick off was both exciting and frustrating.  The IT guys still haven't given me emails for my students, so I couldn't create accounts for them on the NaNo site.  Most of them had emails or knew their parents' emails so thankfully they could still sign-up.  Unfortunately, creating accounts took up a majority of our writing time and our word counts are not too spectacular today.  I myself have written 17 words so far.  But that was in the two minutes between read-aloud and DOL just to show them how the website works.  My real writing time will come once I get home tonight.  I was thinking about running errands tonight after school, but it's getting so late now maybe I'll push it off another night...

Every year we spend a significant chunk of October doing prep exercises to give my students ideas about what to write in their stories.  And every year there are some kids who want to write a totally new story and have no idea they're supposed to use the ideas they thought up just a few days ago! as the basis for their stories.  Ugh!!!  I think I got through to most of them today that they already have ideas for their stories, they just have to type the words on paper now.

One girl has a great story idea about a girl who does barrel racing but breaks her arm right before the big race! But she couldn't figure out how to start it.  She tried and erased at least three times!  I know if she'd just get some words down, she'd be good to go.  But she still has that "it has to be good!" writing syndrome going on.  I sent her part of a pep talk through the YWP (young writers' program) website that will hopefully get her chugging away.  She was excited she could work on it at home through the site.  Hopefully more of them work on it at home now that they're able to!  It makes me (just a little bit) wish I had internet at home so I could write on the site too... oh well! Such is life!