Better and Not

Behavior in our classroom was MUCH better today. I'd say we actually had a good day! Thank you for the prayers!

Religion class was my favorite part of today. Our lesson was on the conclusion to the Lord's Prayer and the main activity was for each student to make an acrostic prayer of his/her name. The sample in the book had phrases of things to pray for, and not just wants/help me/this person. I told them they could do their first name, middle name, and/or last name or some combination of the three and pretty much everyone did their full name. They came up with some super good prayers! One boy even asked if he could take it home with him to pray at bedtime. It really made my heart happy that they were so creative in praising and praying God.

Once again we had a time crunch in the morning with 40 minutes of our Daily 5 time being set aside for Junior Achievement. We are also within the last 50 pages of our read aloud book and of course there are cliffhangers everywhere... we read a little extra today. Are you surprised? I'm guessing we'll finish the book tomorrow. Boy, it's going to be hard to pick the next book. There are so many good ones I want to read with them! I'm not sure if I want to let them vote on my top picks, or if I want to just choose. We'll have to see what their mood is when we finish.

Since we didn't have a ton of time for Writers Workshop today, I had them take the "5 Love Languages" quiz for kids and write down their top two love languages. It was a little weird because they all freaked out at the word 'love', but we made it through. I want to categorize them into the five categories so it's easier for me to show them that they are welcomed and loved in the classroom. It's probably good information for parents to have if they don't already know it, so I'm also contemplating the best way to let their parents know the results. I kind of want to do the quiz with the 7-8th graders, but I think they'll buck more than the 5-6th graders did. Eh, we'll see if we need a time filler someday.