Chatty Monday

Oof, the kids were pretty chatty today. In my experience, Mondays tend to be that way. But today felt a little extra. Maybe the weather is changing? Probably not. The forecast says mid-40s all week.

The girl drama continues to be a rollercoaster. I thought the day had been going fairly well, and then lunch happened. The other 5th grade teacher caught the group of four sending a male classmate to give their target a squished banana wrapped in a napkin. We can't make this up, folks! The principal had a chat with the ladies, I sent an email to parents, and hopefully things will be better after this. 

Some good news: I'll be teaching at Mt. Olive for another two weeks (up until G and I leave for Arizona to visit his parents there). The teacher I'm covering for had emailed the principal saying she wasn't sure when she'd be ready to come back, so I'm continuing my teaching to buy the school a bit more time. Maybe she'll be ready by the time I need to leave. That's what we're all hoping, I think.

For PE today we did jump roping again. A fairly large proportion of the class does not enjoy the jump ropes. Well tough. We all have to do things we don't like. We did our normal 'would you rather' warmups, did individual jumping challenges... "Mrs. H, can I jump and do the 'gritty'?" (that's an endzone football victory dance, and yes, he did indeed do it while jump roping)... then group long jump rope jumping. We ended with the helicopter game... That was a big hit. One person spins around in a circle holding a jump rope close to the ground and classmates need to jump over the spinning rope. If it hits them, they're out. Last man standing wins. 

The other class of 5th graders has a new student. He seems to be fitting in well. Doesn't seem like he's a super strong student. I'm basing that off one class period; he didn't jump right in to doing his English worksheet right away. Mt. Olive uses Shurley English, which is a pretty intense curriculum in grammar and diagramming sentences. I am barely figuring it out (thankfully the teacher manual is very detailed and easy to use), so I'm not sure how to teach this kid what to do. Maybe he'll just pick up on it? We have a test tomorrow. I'll probably need to be creative in how I grade it.

House update: the closing on my house in Nicollet is in just over a week! We have it scheduled for 9am on Valentine's Day. Since I'll be teaching, I'll have to go over the day before to sign the papers. G wants to have a welcome basket left at the house for the couple buying it from us. Good thought. We can drop that off on our way to sign papers. It will be such a relief to have that process behind us!