Wednesday Little Happys

Three random things so far this week that made me smile:

ONE

Monday morning (first day post spring break) one of my girls came in before the bell to say hi.  She likes to come in a little early every day to unpack and help me.  When I said good morning, she smiled and said, "I forgot what your voice sounded like!"

TWO

Yesterday I read this post in one of the kiddos' journals in response to the prompt, "What is something you think is unfair?":

Love when they "think deep" in their journals.  :)  Love kids. 

THREE

By far the most amusing....this afternoon I was picking up the 5th grader I tutor and had his 1st grade brother in tow.  Walking towards my car, 1st grader asked, "Did your car cost 13 dollars and 1 cent?" :-D  It seems he had noticed my 13.1 magnet for the first time!  Loved this.

And now, after quite possibly the most horrifically painful foam rolling session of my entire life (Damn you, IT bands...), with 50% of my legs coated in biofreeze (which btw is making me really freaking cold!!!), I am off to bed...Goodnight!

Three Things Thursday

I don't usually do TTT posts, but seeing as I have three separate little things to share, I figured it fit perfectly. :)

ONE
I am SO done with testing.
No really, shoot me now.  We have two days left, but I'm so exhausted from the frantic review lessons we squeeze in that are not so much teaching as they are me frantically modeling a hundred things at a time on the overhead and saying over and over, "You really need to know this.  We have been practicing this all year.  Why don't you know this yet?!"  So tired.  2 more days...I can almost see the light...

TWO
The best decision I made all day was to throw my TOMS in my bag before school.  While my foot is feeling WAAAY better, I wore heels yesterday too and by today my feet were exhausted.  Enter TOMS to the rescue!  I slipped these comfy babies on during specials, lunch, and after school.  Wonderful.  It's the little things, right?

THREE
I'll tell ya, there is nothing like a good threatening note from a student to start the morning off right!  Gotta love it!  I collected my kiddos' journals yesterday and war finishing writing my response letters this morning when I stumbled upon this gem:

My personal favorite part is, "Don't come to school or else."  Sweet.  Love it.  This is from a totally non-malicious student, so I know that he didn't intend to come across like a crazy serial killer in this note, but honestly.  The student who wrote it is one of those who seems to think he's better than everyone, probably including me (no doubt because his mom feeds him such garbage), and doesn't understand the line between appropriate and inappropriate always.  For anyone else struggling to understand this line, let me give you a brief run-down:

• Appropriate Journal Material: Writing a letter to your teacher to tell about your new video game, your weekend trip to grandma's, or your new shoes.
• Inappropriate Journal Material: Writing a letter to your teacher to offer career advice, threats, and generally words and phrases that could at some point be used against you in a court of law.

Possibly my FAVORITE part of today, though, was when Mr. Principal and I asked mom to come after school to discuss this, and student refused to leave the car.  Which mom allowed.  Student went so far as to hide under the seat when I went out to attempt to convince him to come in, yelling at me from the inside of the car and generally behaving like a child half his age.

Today was definitely a step-back-and-look-at-my-life-and-wonder-how-the-hell-I-got-here kind of day...

Tofurkey it is, in that case!!

Last Tuesday, our last day of school before Thanksgiving break, I assigned this journal prompt:

Write a letter, from the point of view of a turkey, to your family.

Include reasons in the letter that your family should NOT eat the turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.

I love having students write from others' points of view, especially animals, so I love assigning this prompt.  Also, my vegetarian self likes getting the students to think about their food from time to time!! :)  I promise I'm not preaching...I don't want THAT parent phone call!  Anyways, I didn't have a chance to read through them until today.  Here were my two favorites:

(sorry the pictures are super blurry!  I really have to remember to bring my camera to school--my phone isn't cutting it!)

 Dear family,

PLEASE DON'T EAT ME!!!  There are SO many different foods you could eat instead of me!  You can eat potatoes, pie, cranberrys, NOT ME!  Or how about we all be vegiterians for this time.  Please, please, don't eat me.  Turkeys don't need to be Thanksgiving food, how about you take the chickens insted.  (That sounds like a good plan, don't you think?!)  I will give you some time to think about this (or 2 days to be exact!)  PLEASE DONT EAT ME!

Very scared and sad,
      Turkey

Please don't eat me this year for thanks giving this year.  I have lots of dreams when I grow up.  I want to be a Professional turkey dancer.  So if you eat I will never get to accomplish that career.  that would be really sad right so if you want to eat me well PLEASE DONT!!!!!

Sincerely,

         Your Turkey

I'm thinking next year we should do an actual writing project with this prompt...these are too funny!

More Journal Gems

I made a BIG mistake of collecting all 24 journals at once this weekend to read and respond to...and an even bigger mistake of waiting until Sunday evening to start reading through them all...*shakes head* will I never learn?  I always say I'm going to collect a few each day, but between me forgetting to ask for them and students forgetting to turn them in when I DO ask, it doesn't exactly happen.  Any suggestions on how I can space them out better are welcome!

Of course, though, there were a few gems that I just had to take pictures of...unfortunately they are both from a student who writes pretty lightly so the pics didn't turn out too well, but here they are anyways.

Brings you band-aides, brings you chalk, thinks of fun games...the hallmarks of a true friend.  :)  God, I freakin' love kids sometimes!!!  Adorable.

This one just cracked me up!  She definitely has things planned out!  I love it.  And in response, I'm living my dream career!

Journal Gems :)

Two fabulous discoveries made this morning while responding to students' journal entries...

Prompt: "If you won $1,000,000 and couldn't spend any of it on yourself, what would you do with it?"

This student's response was that he would give it to his parents because they do so much for him.  

I adored the illustration complete with text-lingo captions.  :) 

Prompt: "What is your dream career?"

This one made my heart melt. :)

Journals

During one of my MANY summer brainstorming sessions spent pondering the question, "What should I do differently this year to make sure it sucks less than last year?" (okay that's a little dramatic, last year hardly sucked!  it was just a little rough!), I entertained the idea of starting my mornings with journal writing instead of morning worksheets.  I'm not a big busy work person, but I started having the kids do a morning work page as soon as they came in very morning because it settled them down, got the class quiet and in work-mode, and gave me a minute to check in hw, greet the kids, etc.  Anyways, when I was reinventing the Daily 3 this summer and trying to come up with more options for the Work on Writing piece, Mrs. J suggested I try morning journal writing.  That way, the kids would always have the option of continuing an entry during Work on Writing, and would also be in a stronger writing routine.  I decided to go for it and compiled a list of about 100+ prompts from various locations.

I typically have the kiddos write a letter to me about their weekends Monday morning, a miscellaneous prompt Tuesday and Thursday, (Wednesdays we do DOL instead) and write on a prompt connected to our weekly literacy theme Friday mornings.  This weekend, I took home a crate of journals to peruse.  I have collected them a few times previously, but hadn't for about two weeks.  The prospect of reading and responding to entries in 24 journals was a bit daunting..I don't reply to every prompt, but I do read them all and try to respond to the ones that really show their best effort especially.

As exhausting as it is to respond to that many journal entries (I know, shame on me for waiting too long to collect them, but there are always SO MANY other things on my mind at the end of the day...), I am SO GLAD I am doing the journals this year.  It's amazing how much I learn about my students from some of their entries, and I feel like it's a great opportunity to build relationships.  Also, I found a few true "gems" among the journals:

Fabulous student entry 1:
One of my girls, in response to the prompt, "Something that bugs me is..." wrote about her older brother.  She told me that her brother bugs her because he will always put on his "Jason mask" and sneak up on her and her friends when they are playing.  I almost DIED laughing because that sounds EXACTLY like the way my older brother used to bug me!  Actually, it was the Freddy Kreuger mask that really got to me...I mean seriously, I'm 10 years old, I turn around, and THIS GUY is standing behind me, knife-claw and all.  SCARY.  Anyways, I loved writing back to her and telling her about MY brother and how he used to love to bug me. :)

Fabulous Student Entry 2:
In response to the same prompt (Something that bugs me is...), one of my "diva-ish" girls wrote the following entry:

In case you can't read it, it reads, "Something that really bugs me is boys.  Boys bug me because they think they know everything.  They think that they are smarter than girls.  And they think that they are tougher than a girl.  And last but not least, they think they are cooler than girls.  Then they say that they're richer than girls.  The next day they will be asking us for money because they want to buy something."

:-D I was DYING laughing!!!  You go, girl :)

In any case, I am loving the journals.  Today I implemented a new system though to avoid getting bogged down with the journals on the weekends.  I'm collecting journals from 1 team every day, and two teams on Thursdays (my stay-late day).  Ex. Monday collect team 1, Tuesday team 2, etc.  I figure this way I will have less to respond to at a time, less to cart around with me, and most importantly, I'll be able to spend more time reading and responding since I won't be overwhelmed.  I hope I am able to keep up with them!