Forgotten

Grr... I forgot my clipboard at home this morning! and the pile of papers still needing to be corrected! I was so focused on getting to school on time/a little early that I forgot to grab them off my kitchen table. When I went to pull things out of my teacher bag, I realized it was much lighter than it should be. I debated going home for it, but would it be worth the time? In the end, I decided I could get along without it for a day. Well, I survived, but it was tough sometimes! The pile of papers proved to be troublesome too. Normally I wait to collect the papers in the spelling mailbox until Thursday when their workbook pages are due, but yesterday I must've emptied it without thinking because there were three kids today who said they'd handed their pages in, but they weren't in the box! They're surely in the pile in my kitchen, but I'll have to wait until I get home to check.

The kindergarten class is going to try flexibility seating. Mrs. E picked up a few of our smallest balls to show her students. Some of my girls went down to teach her students the right way to sit on them. It was a great way for them to be teachers to the younger students! We're running out of exercise balls though... one got popped earlier this week by a student smacking the sides of the ball with her fists (she'd been holding a pencil at the time). Another one mysteriously loses air but we can't find a hole. We sent that one down too since kindergartners are much lighter than 5/6th graders.

Match the Selfie to the Shelfie

Blech, the gym smells like basketball, the sweaty kind. Even though the season is technically over, State Basketball is this weekend and both boys and girls teams are going. Friday there's a pep fest from 12-12:15, and afterwards the 5-8th graders are dismissed. I might go up to Friday's games with Pastor and Mrs. B since they offered me a ride.

Nothing too out of the ordinary today again. No mice. No one sick. We're working on planning National Lutheran Schools Week and we're still pushing reading lots of pages for "I Love to Read Month". The latest teacher bulletin board is "Match the Selfie to the Shelfie" where students have to guess whose bookshelf belongs to which teacher. This one is way easier than last week's. Everyone guessed mine right away from trick or treating at my house! I knew I should've moved the plant away from the shelves and taken the elephants off! Oh well, it will help the kids who didn't do so well last time feel better about getting more right. :)

Mouse Mouse Get Outta My House

No, there wasn't a mouse in my house today. ...But there was in my classroom! A little one about two inches long scurried around the lab table and the reading corner. Many of the girls screamed and jumped up on their desks. Grr. Their loud talking and shouting made the mouse scurry even more! I had hoped to chase it out of our room, but that was not to be. Finally I got our resident 8th grade fix-it man and he set up a trap with peanut butter in a corner. So far the mouse has not been caught, but we haven't seen it again either! This is the first mouse I've seen in my classroom in all the years I've been at this school (six). I've seen them in the coat room or in other parts of the school, but never my room. Man! I hope there isn't a hole anywhere! Hopefully it gets caught tonight when no one is here.

The other exciting thing today was the MSU play at Nicollet. They moved the time of the play to 8:30, so we had a super quick turnaround time from when our kids arrived on the bus to when they had to get back on the bus to get over to Nicollet. We made it by 8:30! And we expected to sneak in after they'd already started. But when we walked through the doors of the auditorium, no one was there. Strange... only the actors were there. It turns out they adjusted the time so that we could make it there before the show started. Well, that was nice of them!

Paint Splatter

We did a cool art project this afternoon that involved straws and watercolor paint. First, we drew a picture of a person's head, leaving a space on the top to add paint hair. Then, we dripped wet blobs of watercolor paint in the hairline and used straws to blow the paint around. Wild and crazy hair!!! 

A bunch of them had such fun blowing on their hair that they got lightheaded! I told them they should take a break from blowing if that was the case. Another girl cautioned, "Don't stand up or you might faint!" No one fainted, thankfully. And the faces/hair turned out really neat!

Joe totally buried himself at lunchtime today; there must be a storm coming. I heard we're expecting snow on Monday. Why do the big storms happen on days we don't have school? I'm Fulda-bound again this weekend, and was looking forward to a nice long weekend at home, but depending on the weather, I might have to come back to Courtland early...

Food Fear Factor

The wind is howling out there. We had a few nice days and now it's time for the weather to dip down to it's normal temperatures. It's so blustery it's making the internet slow! Well, maybe the wind isn't causing that, but man, computers are dragging today!

It's unfortunate because I had/have a lot of computer work to do today. Miss S and I signed our school up for Fine Arts Fair events. A very kind lady gave the teachers a gift card for Teachers Pay Teachers (a site for teachers to sell/share resources they've made for their classrooms with other teachers). There's a sale today, so I have been searching for items on Teachers Pay Teachers to spend my gift card. Yay good deals! Boo slow internet! But I think I have my purchases figured out, so hopefully I can go home soon. 

This afternoon the school nurse did Food Fear Factor with my students. She had 17 different fruits and vegetables of all the colors available for my students to try. For each three they tried, they got one marble in the jar. Almost everyone tried everything! They earned 48 marbles which put us over the top of the jar. That means tomorrow they get to pick a prize. I'm guessing they'll pick that we watch a movie. One student has been asking to watch Hidden Figures, a movie about the African american women who programmed NASA's first space mission. It's PG, so there's a good chance we can watch it, as long as there's no bad language.

Some of the fruits/veggies we tried today: guava juice (really good even though I don't like guava fruit), dried okra (very strange to eat), blood orange, mango, fennel root, beet greens, beets, mashed cauliflower, mushrooms, red peppers, dates, prunes, avocado, and carrots.

Valentine's Day/Ash Wednesday

Surprisingly, my class was much calmer today, even with all the candy and assorted treats they've been consuming all day!

Our chapel message was about how people show love for each other on Valentine's Day and how God shows his love for us, so love was on the brain when they got back to class. As we picked our Daily 5 rounds, they asked what my farmer and I were doing for Valentine's Day. "Going to church of course!" I answered. "And eating takeout spaghetti from the 7-8th grade Lenten supper." 

My students kept going with the idea, "So after you're done eating, you'll maybe watch a movie."

"And pop some popcorn!"

"And you'll both reach in the bowl at the same time and grab each other's hands!"

"Oooo! And there will be a ring in the bowl!"

"Miss H! That might be your Valentine present!!!"

"You could get engaged on Valentine's Day!!!!" the girls were almost in hysterics.

"Nope. Too obvious," was my totally calm reply. Then my mischievous side snuck in, "I'm going to tell him you said that!"

"WHAT?!"

"Okay, moving on!"

The rest of the morning was uneventful compared to that. They did convince me to listen to music this morning during Daily 5. "It's Valentine's Day, Miss H!" they cajoled, "and Ash Wednesday! It's a special day!" But they weren't able to convince me to read more of our read-aloud book. We started a new one yesterday, All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook. 

Other classes must have had their parties at the end of the day (we did ours at snack time) because little ones from other classrooms kept up a sporadic stream of valentine card deliveries while I tried to teach my class science. My after school snack stash is back to brimming again! It is so sweet that they thought of me! One 4th grader handed me his and explained, "I only wrote Emily on the card because I didn't know how to spell your last name."

We tried giving Joe the tortoise a little Valentine treat... a chunk of apple (which he loved), a bit of banana, and a tidbit of pineapple. The pineapple must not have sat well with him. We noticed him foaming at the mouth a little and using his tongue to lick the roof of his mouth. Then he pawed at his face with one of his front legs. We've never seen him do that before! I tried wiping his mouth out, but he didn't want me touching his face and went in his shell. Someone had the great idea to give him a bath, and when we did, he stuck his face underwater and rinsed out his mouth. Too tangy? Too rough on the tongue? Whatever the reason, we will avoid pineapple from now on. 

Antsy

No snow overnight, and another day of antsy and chatty kids. Joe is still buried, so maybe there's still something coming??? Or he's just pouting from being displaced during the tournament.

I had two surprise visitors today... my dad and youngest brother swung by at lunch time in between college visits. My students told them a little about the fire stories they've been writing, and we finally found out what happened with that mysterious car!

A husband/wife were on their way somewhere and thought they could drive their car through the snow on the road (it hadn't been plowed), so they kept trying and backing up, trying and backing up. Some snow must've gotten into their engine which caused it to start on fire. They're all okay, and my brother said the car was gone the next morning by the time he went to school.

Nothing as sinister as my students came up with, but I'm glad the mystery is solved at last!