Surprise!

Oh I'm so excited! One of my coworkers tagged me in a post on Facebook today. A to Zinnia in New Ulm has a promotion on Fridays that if your name is "such and such" you get a free bouquet of flowers.  Guess what name is today's winner??? Yep, Emily! So I just need to make it to the store before six and I get free flowers! How neat is that?

The 8th grade geography student heard back from the coin people. The comment said there were some Italian coin collectors on the site, maybe they'd know more about it.  So we have to wait and see.

This morning the 5th and 6th graders and I had a frank talk about interrupting. They've been absolutely terrible about it this week, distracting each other and talking over me nearly constantly.  I'm sick of it.  Last night I read a post that gave 22 different ways to stop students from blurting and it inspired me to do something about my talkative class.  They were much quieter after our discussion.  We talked about why they act way quieter in Mr. E's room without prompting, ways to make our classroom quieter, and consequences for them getting above a certain noise level (their idea).  Basically it comes down to self-control; they all said they knew which times during the day they are allowed to talk and which times they are not allowed to talk.  So that means they are talking just because they want to talk.  We must've spent about 10-20 minutes discussing. They didn't have a ton of ideas about how to make our room more respectful, aside from just being quiet when they're supposed to. But like I said, the morning was quieter after that.  We'll see how long it lasts.

Art came at the end of the day. Today's project was "Shadow People" where you draw yourself, put that paper on top of black paper, and cut out both pages at the same time, resulting in a shadow person. You glue them both on a colored piece of paper with the shadow sticking out just a little bit.  It's pretty neat.  The kiddos were having a tough time drawing themselves, but a few of them did really well.  One boy whose forte is not art drew this: (He must not have been listening to my instructions to 'draw yourself', because this doesn't look anything like him...also, he added the booger and gold tooth after the following conversation happened).

When he saw me looking at it, he said, "I couldn't get the arms." My response, "I see... is that armpit hair?" "Yes, it is." I looked at him thinking to myself, do you even have armpit hair? But I thought that would be weird to ask him, so I refrained. Then he said (totally serious), "Except I don't have armpit hair. The armpit hair is just for fun."  I totally lost it and burst out laughing.  Oh these kids!