8

 Balloon prize: redo round

Today ended up being an outside day. Such perfect weather, it was too nice to stay inside. I helped Mr. E and the 7-8th graders film their talent show video after lunch, which took a long time and ate up noon recess. Mr. E and I conferred and decided to punt on class today, with stipulations. The 5-8th graders have been hypercritical of each other while we've played softball, so Mr. E gave a big lecture about positivity and being good role models, etc. IF they could play nicely, we would stay outside for an hour. They did it! 

I pitched, Mr. E umped, and the kids played. It was awesome. (I'm improving my pitches little by little...). After our hour was up, we went inside. Ugh, that was hard. 

Thinking about what I wanted to accomplish with my students this afternoon, I figured we could probably go outside and read for a while. The day I'd picked to read outside didn't end up being nice, so we set that prize aside for later. Today was later. 

Now to decide how long... We were going to finish playing pictionary; they were okay skipping that. Have recess; they wanted me to read-aloud while they played catch. That could work. And I wanted them to work on their egg car lab; they did that a bit in the morning and all assured me they'd be ready to test their vehicles tomorrow as planned. So out we went. 

I read aloud for another 40 minutes. It took a bit to pick a book; they weren't super sucked in by the stories we read from A Long Way From Chicago, so we read the first few chapters of a Gordon Korman book. They thought we could finish the book in an hour. We couldn't. They wanted to try anyway. So we did. It was okay but not as gripping as any of us were thinking. We'll see what they say about it tomorrow.