Last Day

My kids were out of sorts today. It wasn't a horrible day, but they were hard to settle again and back to their old name-calling shenanigans. And complaining. Good thing it's the last day.

I ended up doing a balloon thing of sorts... Instead of writing our schedule on the board, I put our "last day of school to-dos" on slips of paper inside balloons with the amount of minutes they would take on the outside. Each kid popped one balloon.

Book Launch Party- 10min- They were excited to unwrap their NaNos. They loved the covers, but the back page... Complaints about the pictures I used as their author picture. One kid even threw his in the trash because he didn't want his picture on the back. We ended up putting a sticker over his face and then he was okay with keeping it. 

Daily 5 Rounds- 1h- I met with six students this morning to wrap up their reading. It went quick. They were pretty settled during that hour and quite a few read a bunch trying to finish reading their books before school got out. We had a class 'garage sale' where they could spend tokens they'd earned on prizes from the prize box. I got rid of quite a few items that way! And re-collected a bunch of tokens. I think a bunch went home in crates and backpacks... Their clean-up was not very clean. Lots of stuff shoved in wherever it would fit. Pretty typical of this class! 

Pinatas- 30min- Instead of hanging them by string that always breaks, we just hit them with baseball bats. 

Religion- 30min- We finished the bible but skimmed/summarized pretty much everything after Jesus rose from the dead. Bummer, because there's a lot of good stories in Acts.

Snack/Read Aloud- 30min- We didn't finish our read aloud, but no one cried about it. I had written that this had to be a morning activity on the outside of the balloon to ensure we'd have snack this morning, but they ended up popping it the half an hour before lunch. Oh well. 

Time Capsules- 10min- They loved looking through the things they put in there! Their pictures from the first day of school got a big reaction. Those were the pictures I used as their author pictures on their NaNos. The other big item was the string that was the height they were at the beginning of the year. A lot were surprised by how they grew! One girl must've held her string loose when she cut it because according to the string, she actually shrunk!

Lunch/Recess- 1h-ish- Indoors because it was cold. I had four kids staying in to study memory work. There was a shoe incident that involved a 4th and 6th grader throwing a 7th grader's shoes around the gym (before I got out to the gym of course). Sigh. They found one shoe, but not the other. She had to call her mom to bring an extra pair of shoes to wear home.

Science Lab- 30min- We made electromagnets! They wrapped wire around a giant nail, hooked the wire to a battery, and tested how many paper clips it could carry.

Clean Out Desks/Crates- 30min- This ended up being 10min because we went on a hunt for the missing shoe. No luck. We had to end early so we could get over to church by 1:30 for closing chapel.

Chapel ended at 2:10 and the kids who got their desks done already went to recess with the preschoolers. The others continued to clean. I had a few kids who used paint pens on their desks. That was a bugger to get off. The longer it had been on the desk, the harder it was to get off. I knew it would happen, but the kids didn't listen to me months ago when they decided to draw on their desks. A lot of elbow grease went in to scraping that stuff off.

After school, I spent my time entering grades, listening to memory work, and filling out report cards. I got them done with 10 minutes to spare! Then came the potluck (I brought a super juicy watermelon and cheerio bars). Then came the awards night. They honored me for my 11 years of teaching with a few pieces of chocolate cake, special cake from Lola's. They wanted to get a big cake, but two cake places said they didn't have time because of graduation cake, so PTL decided to go small and easy. After that came the carnival. I stood around talking to people awhile; it was nice to visit. Now it's time to pack up Joe and head home for a good night of sleep before our wedding celebration tomorrow!

Egg update: Nothing hatching in the incubator.

T Minus One

Caswell Softball Day= we took 3rd place! Total: we won three and lost two. I pitched all five games. 

My glove is the one my dad had when he was a kid, so it has lived a long life. Some of the strings holding it together are brittle, and today they finally bit the dust. A few of them broke, so the catching part of the glove began to split apart. I still pitched all my games with it! But I'd say it's time to retire. 

T Minus Two

Still no ducklings. There's still time though. We're giving up on the chicken eggs; I think I'll unplug the incubator before I go home tonight.

Today was another mostly okay day. We had read-aloud all morning, but they got a little antsy after a while. I gave them brain breaks and we did some chunks outside, but man, they were hard to focus outside. I ended up bring them in early. Still, they were mostly productive this morning. All the piñatas are finished! A few got math or handwriting finished. A few worked on crossword puzzles or drew pictures. 

We started a new book, The Unteachables by Gordon Korman. One kid complained that we only read Gordon Korman books and he wanted something different. Actually, we've read 12 books this year not counting this one, and of those, only four are by Gordon Korman. But they have been back to back. I don't think we'll finish this book by the last day of school. I tried to skip over irrelevant sentences to make it read faster, but there's only so much I can do. We made it about a third of the way through reading all morning. 

The kindergarten class had their celebration (aka graduation) over at church this afternoon. Mr. D went over to help, so I was going to supervise his class at recess. Mr. E normally does PE for K-3 at that time while his kids do art, but their art teacher (Mrs. E) was running the graduation! We had a lot of kids and not many teachers to supervise. I suggested we have a massive game of kickball. And so we did!

It was really fun. Mr. E made teams, dividing kids by grades. I was all time pitcher and Mr. E all time ump. One of the parents arranged for an ice cream truck to come at the end of the day, so when it was time for that, Mr. E sent them over by grades while the rest of us kept playing. The teams stayed even! After everyone had gone through the line, we did all-school recess until the end of the day. 

Tomorrow is Caswell softball day. The weather is a little iffy over the noon hour, but hopefully we can get a few games in beforehand. Maybe it will pass quickly and we can play afterwards. Time will tell!

T Minus Three

We actually had a decent day today. I would even call it pleasant. Of course I had to deal with a few situations and general buckiness about late work and memory work, but they were minor and right away in the morning. 

They were probably tired from track and field. Or my schedule flopping worked. 

The half an hour after PE is often a battle, so I moved history to the morning, and let them pick what they wanted to do after PE. I wrote a list of what we needed to do on the board and then we voted what to do first. MN history won out ("Let's get the worst stuff over with!")

After that we did rounds and then pinata time. Ugh. Two groups were out of glue because of poor management of their resources. One group forgot to put the lid on and it dried up. The other group mixed food coloring in their glue, which made it runny and not sticky. Their consequence: do a job to get more glue. The kid who forgot to do the lid did a job right away. The kid who put the food coloring in refused to do a job saying he did a job already. Yeah, he 'wiped' the lab table off, but it's still dirty. I told him he had to do it again to earn more glue. So he said he would leave the pinata as is, only half done, even though it would be a bad grade. His poor partner eventually did a job to get more glue, while the first kid tried to use the food colored glue on the pinata anyway. 🙄 Sigh. 

T Minus Four- Track and Field

It was such a lovely day for Track and Field. Sunny, 71, with a slight breeze every now and then. 

As usual, I helped run the long jump pit. No hop step jump again this year. Man, that makes the day go much smoother and faster. We finished around 11:30 and had plenty of time for lunch. 

After that was the running events and relays. I usually help with the lining up or timing, but they had plenty of high school volunteers, so I mostly stood around and watched. 

We wrapped up the day by 1:45! I was in Mankato around 2:30 and started doing wedding errands. Still lots to be done before our party Saturday! 

T Minus Five

Boy, today was a tough day, but actually better than I expected. Rain was in the forecast for today. Not good for Track and Field Day in Fairmont. If it got cancelled, the rain date would be Monday and we'd have to go to school today. I got the message this morning that it was postponed due to rain. 

Fantastic. 

I had a room full of kids cranky about having to come to school. Some hadn't said their memory work yesterday and now needed to say it before they could go to recess. Others didn't do their math because they wouldn't have math until Monday. So. The start of school was rough. 

One kid got kicked out to work in the 1-2nd grade room for a half an hour because he was so disrespectful. He wouldn't leave the classroom, so I called for backup (his mom). I hated doing it, but our morning would've been so much worse had he stayed. Another student was on the edge of her worst behavior, so I had a chat with her before school started. Lots of attitude, but she turned it around and she had a good morning. Once the other student came back, he had a good morning too. 

The rest of the day had ups and downs. But I made it. They made it. We made it. Only five more days to go! And two of those are not in the classroom. We can do it! But keep the prayers coming.

My kids are adamant that the chicken eggs are still growing. I wanted to empty out that incubator, but they insisted that the eggs are alive and we should keep them in. So, they candled them all and picked out the ones they didn't think were growing. They took out four. We're going to crack them open to see what we can see. Our duck and goose eggs should hatch Sunday! I hope we have better luck with them.

Last night's talent show was a success. You can watch it here. Or you can just watch our teacher skit, which was the best act for sure. 😉 My kids did okay on their Amazing Caterpillar Show. 7-8th bells sounded good. Serving root beer floats went well too. We had a lot of ice cream leftover and a bunch of pop (we'll serve it at the spring carnival next Friday) and raised about $200 towards Camp Omega next year!

Hair Genius and Worm Rescuer

I have an 8th grade boy who loves his hair. This kid has what I like to call "flippy hair." His long bangs are 'just so'. He kind of makes fun of himself for them and his classmates tease him about it, but all good-natured. Today, he said to his male classmate, "Do a side part. It's easy."

His classmate, "No."

Him: "Come on. Just try it! It'll go back in place easy." 

The other boy was not convinced, "Why should I listen to you?" 

He said, "Cuz I'm a hair genius." 

The other funny thing from today was at noon recess. It rained a lot, so the worms were out. (I picked a few off my driveway before leaving for school). One 5th grader made it his personal mission to rescue all the worms on the ball field. He'd catch a ball, throw it to me (the pitcher), look down and notice a few worms, grab them, then throw them off the field. 😲 All recess. 😂