#3

Two days left! Two days left! Assignments and projects are being handed in, some are early which is nice because I can get a head start correcting (hopefully won't be so much to do tomorrow night).  We were supposed to have another cleaning session after school today, but the weather was bad... tornado sighted in Lake Crystal and flash flooding in New Ulm, so we postponed that event until tomorrow.  I don't think the kids will be thrilled with the stuff still taking over the gym.  We have tables on their sides at half-court so it's harder to get to the stuff from the shed.

I introduced my students to Shirley Temple today.  She was referred to in our read aloud book (the character wanted to tap dance like her and thus carried tap shoes with her everywhere), so I looked up some videos on YouTube.  Yes, that got us distracted for a good 20 minutes.  Still educational though... pop culture!  We watched her sing "Animal Crackers" and "Good Ship Lollipop" and watched one of the baby movies.  I wanted to find the wild west one I remember from my childhood, but we'd already spent enough time on her, so we moved on to different things.

The other cool thing we did today was with wordless picture books.  I borrowed a whole bunch from the library on Monday and had each student read three of them and write a paragraph/Venn diagram describing what each story was about, how they were similar, and how they were different (many of them were by the same author, so it would be easy to compare).  After they quit complaining they had fun!  And it didn't take them as long to do as they thought!  Teacher win!

I also had my class fill out a Teacher Survey and a Reading Survey to see what things I should keep the same/change for next year.  They're always fun to read.  A lot of them want better places to focus, or for me to teach them how to focus.  Put that on next year's list of things to do.  At their suggestions, I plan to find ways to partition sections of the classroom so they can read in peace (if not quiet), although I have a feeling next year will be calmer without the 6th graders in here to distract.  Each individual student isn't distracting on his/her own, but put them all together with the 5th graders and they can be quite volatile!  The incoming 5th graders are all (mostly) quiet, studious girls who (as far as I can tell) are able to focus.  That should help the noise level!

Tomorrow's balloon prize: play any game you want during Word Work and Work on Writing.