Class Color Day

My class always gets the short end of the stick in picking colors. For whatever reason, they do our room last so we end up with no choice in colors. The 8th grader always asks, "Okay, what color do you want?" And then says "Nope, already taken," for every choice my kids bring up. Wouldn't it be better to say what colors are actually available? Our colors are gray and pink. Brown was another option. I wore pink pants, gray shirt/sweater, and a pink scarf, just to be a little out of the ordinary. My kids were like, "Oh big surprise, you're wearing a scarf again. Have we ever seen you without a scarf?" It's just too cold in winter to go without one!

As depressing as yesterday was, today was the opposite. My kids remembered all sorts of stuff we've learned over the past weeks. They were productive with their morning time and problem-solved schedule changes in the morning. And they were quick to volunteer to run errands. The 7-8th graders were focused in class today and asked a bunch of questions, plus the stuff we learned easily tied into stuff we learned in past units, which they remembered! And we finished five minutes early. 

Bells went so much better today than Tuesday. I figured out we've been playing our Fine Arts Fair song waaaaay too slow, which is why it didn't sound like anything. We had to double our current speed. One student asked if we could play a metronome to help us stay in rhythm... awesome idea. A quick Google search and there we were. My players were able to up the tempo! Plus we fixed the books so the page turn is easier. The song is still rough, but we've made leaps and bounds progress from Tuesday.  February's song is in good shape too. I'm a little nervous about the March piece because of the running 8th notes. I wanted to practice that today too, but some didn't have parts highlighted, so we ended practice with highlighting. Next time!

Another high from today was the 5-6th brainstorming after our morning devotion. We're doing the Red Letter Challenge and today's challenge was to pick a person to pray for for the rest of the challenge and leave little gifts for them every once in a while. Well, you might have guessed my kids wanted to do that. So we did! We picked prayer partners for the rest of February (Even me!) and will leave a little treat in our partner's desk once a week. They wanted to do new ones each month for the rest of the year, but the 6th grader who brought it up had a better idea, "Actually, we should do this month first and see how we like it." I love it because that's usually what I say to them. They are learning things after all! 😁

Our day ended bittersweetly. We finished our exploration of space today with a science test. In the middle of the test one of them looked up, wide-eyed. "Wait Miss H, does this mean that we're done learning about space?" I nodded. More heads popped up. "What?! We are! But I don't want to be!" Another, "Yeah, this stuff sticks in my head way easier." Another, "Me too. It feels like we've been learning about it forever and then not very long!" Our next science topic is biomes, which, they probably won't get into as much as space, but they do get to make another powerpoint, so they'll be happy about that.