Squeak

...There's squeaking in the walls... I haven't seen any mice and I dearly hope they haven't made it in the room, but I've definitely heard squeaks as I work at my desk.  So far my classroom has been mouse free... I'll have to get our 7th grade 'janitor' to set some traps out in the coatroom.  

Spring is definitely in the air now.  As I walked out to my car this morning, I heard birds chirping and smelled the earth thawing out from the last bit of snow.  Kids have been outside at recess, playing in the sandbox (though not my kids... they're too wimpy and still play in the gym so it's not cold).

The end of the quarter is on Friday, so we're kicking it into high gear to get everything finished up before then.  With Writing Workshop, I don't have many grades for English. Instead, I have students turn in one piece of writing they are most proud of, one that is as perfect as they can possibly get it, or at least a piece of writing that shows they learned the skills we learned in English this quarter.  Together we made a checklist of things I'll grade their one piece of writing on.  This includes: beginning and ending punctuation, possessive nouns, homophones, quotation marks, capitalized proper nouns, etc.  They were so focused today! Some dug out stories they'd written earlier in the year, planning to polish them up.  Others started new stories.  A few decided to write a letter (showing off their letter formatting skills!).  I'm excited to see what they come up with!  I also plan to have them grade their writing, just to see how they think they're doing in English class this quarter.

This morning, a bunch of students asked if they could go get a pencil from their backpacks.  This isn't a new phenomena... for whatever reason, my students like to keep the only pencil they have in their book bags.  It's weird.  What's even weirder is that it was halfway through our rounds before the student asked to get it.  How did she make it through half the morning without a pencil?!  I actually asked her that and she admitted she had a regular pencil in her desk, but the better mechanical pencil was out in the coatroom.  

Lunch today was a bit crazy; our cook never showed up.  She's the secondary cook hired to serve when our head cook has to work at her other job.  I don't know why #2 didn't come today, but we had no plan for lunch without her.  Thankfully, Mr. E was in New Ulm with the 8th graders touring the high school, so he swung by Papa Murphy's pizza and picked up a bunch.  What's even better is that they had a sale going on so each family-sized pizza was only about $6! It was definitely a God thing.