Treats

Well, that student didn't wake up at midnight to write her NaNo... she forgot, which is fine since I'd rather have her at school well rested.

Whew! Today was a doozy. The NaNo site froze a few times since it's the first day. Then students couldn't figure out how to log in or why their word counts weren't showing up (they'd been writing in the Novel Notes section, not the Chapter section). But we got it all straightened out. The word count chart in the front of the classroom is sprouting little bars of color. One girl's goal (the midnight writer) for today is to get up to 500 words. She said if she writes 500 words each day, she'll meet her goal in 8 days! But she doesn't want to do that; I think she'll bump her goal up when she gets close to the 8,500 words she set.

I played music (instrumental) during the morning and shared cookies and hot chocolate from El Salvador (yes, I still had a little left). At first they all thought the cocoa was good, but I think I added too much water or else the cocoa settled at the bottom so it wasn't as sweet and flavorful as they thought. It's much different than American cocoa, that's for sure!

Half the cookies were ones I brought back from Guatemala (Lily, our Guatemalan leader bakes them and sells them in stores in the area... Walmart actually asked her to mass produce them for their store, but she didn't want to expand her business that much so she said no.) and half were ones I baked last night for trick or treaters. I had a bunch, all were kids from school. A few that said they would come didn't, but that was because they couldn't remember which house number I was. Oh well, they got cookies today! Only one kid took candy; everyone else went with warm cookies. Man, they were good! It was a premade jar someone had given me a while ago as a present... just add butter and an egg! Super easy, super delicious.

Our student teacher, Miss M visited after school. Oh the kids are going to love her! She's pretty and has a kind face (steps one and two to winning over my students' hearts) and a nice voice. I gave her copies of the class roster with pictures, a potential reading/English plan for the month, and the two books I use to run Daily 5 and Writer's Workshop. She's going to come in right away in the morning to help kids with math and other stuff, so she'll actually be here from 8:15-11ish most days. She starts next Wednesday.