Beautiful

Today was the complete opposite of the weather yesterday... sunny, warm, and calm. It got up to 37 degrees today! 

With that in mind, I gave my kids extra recess. Although technically, one could argue that we had STEM time outside. (I even put on my snowpants to help build). All but two of my students spent the majority of the time building a snow sea creature about to eat a snowman (the snowman has a bite out of it). They named the serpent Suliman. After that, they were going to build a donut, and one girl started, but we ran out of time. 

If you look carefully, you can see the other snowmen we built last week at the top left of the picture. 

This morning the 5-6th graders and I started a new read-aloud book... Smart Cookie by Elly Swartz. One of the 5th graders brought it from home and wanted us to read it together. It's on my to-read list but I haven't read it yet! It's been fun to make predictions with them and model 'good brainwork' while reading. They convinced me to read extra by making the deal to skip English today but do double English tomorrow. I wrote the deal on the board so I wouldn't forget! And I put a date on it too, just so they won't try to weasel out of it. Then they patted themselves on the back at how good they are at convincing me to do stuff they want to do. I asked if they ever considered that I'm so easy to convince because these things are what I want to do and they're more educational than they think. Huh. That hadn't occurred to them. So we talked about the good things their brains are doing when we read-aloud and make connections and predictions, etc.

Over lunch, they wanted to watch the Presidential Inauguration, so I put the livestream on. We missed the actual swearing in, but I found a video of Biden reciting the oath, so we watched that and they agreed that was good enough for them. Thankfully, it was a peaceful transition of power.

The 7-8th grade slime is continuing to grow. Some are really taking off and others are not doing anything. Left- the original slime is spreading out. Center- Helga is conquering the world! Right- Zippy is branching out.

Our original slime is growing so much (and a few were growing so little), I let the kids whose mold isn't growing take a chunk from our original just to see if it will grow in their plates. I left the lid of the original off and set another petri dish next to it to in the bag to see if it will grow into that plate and eat those oatmeal pieces. We'll see!