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!