Summertime, summertime, sum-sum summertime

I am on day 4 of my summer vacation and I have discovered some things. 1. My dog, Roofio, is my best friend and she likes to sleep most of the day. I try to get her to wake up by taking several long walks, but when we return, she goes back to sleep. I imagine I am cramping her style. - SIDENOTE- Yesterday while on one of our infamous walks, the sky opened up and we had to sprint back to our house in what can only be described as a monsoon of wind and rain. Roofio was soaking wet and of course, she was groomed the day before. 2. I love Pixiwoo and thank the world for bringing those amazing women to me. Watching them apply makeup is like having someone cut your hair. It is the most relaxing feeling in the world. It helps that no matter what makeup they decide to do, in the end it ALWAYS looks amazing. My birthday wish is to visit them in the UK and have them do my makeup. 3. I am a very creative person who just hasn't began creating much. I have a list of all the things I am going to create this summer including a paper organizer for my classroom and a rosette wreath for my door. 4. My ABSOLUTE FAVORITE show is So You Think You Can Dance! It has been for years and when the summer ends I think I am more sad about the show ending. If you have never watched it before, this is the season to start. They are all quite fabulous. If you become as obsessed as me, go on youtube and type in SYTYCD and a sea of videos will appear. I have too many favorites to name but when you start watching them, you will become addicted to it in the best way. SERIOUSLY WATCH IT! 5. I have begun reading A Tale of Two Cities and I am not smart enough to read it. I have always wanted to read this book with its historical and romantic ties, how could it not be PERFECT for me? Well, while I read it and have to look up words I don't know or I have to read a sentence and translate it the way one does with a college textbook. So far I am about 20 pages in and although its kinda tricky for me, I will finish it! -SIDENOTE- I just finished reading One Day. I saw that it was coming out as a movie this summer so I picked up a copy and began reading. It was great and immediately upon finishing I went on imdb.com and watched the trailers. I love Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, who are playing the leads, so I am excited for August 19th. As my summer trails on I am sure more discoveries will be made. Tally-Ho :)

You may say we are dreamers

While driving to Cross Fit one night, thinking about my May bulletin board, I heard "Imagine" on the radio. I instantly thought that my title needed to be "You may say we are dreamers, but we're not the only ones." I decided to also include our social studies unit All About Work and had the students write about their futures. Additionally on Grandparent's Day, I had grandparents write what they wanted to be "when they grow up" and used the program Comic Life. Lastly, I took a picture of each child "dreaming" about their futures. I was so proud of how the end product turned out.

Lego Club

I am blessed to work in a school with some wonderful parents. One in particular noticed her own sons' love of Lego and began researching. A discovery was made about a Junior Lego Club that she introduced to fourth graders. However she also was willing to visit all of the classrooms and do a mini-lesson with the students. Let me tell you how excited they were! First she told them the rules including my favorite which was that there is a 4 minute period of thinking and building WITHOUT talking. I thought, "yea right!" They were silent and did not touch the Lego blocks until she told them to.

One instruction was to build things that make them happy --> see the picture of Lego people watching TV and making dinner.

Another instruction was to build something new or exciting --> see the picture of the assembly line where the pieces moved along to make real tools.

And lastly, make their lunch. One of my autistic students created his sandwich (jelly, mustard, and ham?) and his juice box. -- see picture below. He used the small blocks to represent each of the colors of the things on his sandwich. As well as creating a straw in his juice.

I was so impressed with their work, their ideas, and their passions! Later in the winter I was invited to judge the 4th grade creations at their Lego Club Expo. Truly intelligent fourth grade brains out there.

So Proud

For the month of April my students worked very hard on writing similes. They really seemed to understand the concept and some went waaaay beyond my expectations. For the April bulletin board, the students used an outline I created with about 10 basic color words and wrote a simile for each color. Then they typed their poems on the computer and inserted a picture to match their writing. They demonstrated many computer processing skills using Word, such as indenting, changing the font and size, inserting clip art. Afterwards they made a duck or bunny and glued their poems onto the body part. (This idea came from Mrs. Smith, a teacher at Union Hill School. She had amazing pictures of BBs in her school. I made my own patterns looking at her duck examples. To her... THANK YOU SO MUCH) Of course the boys picked the duck and the girls picked the bunny. The main BB was made using graphics purchased from Scrappin' Doddles. I freehanded my own 'bigger' versions.

Never Ending New Students

Putting a question out there to whoever is there to answer. How many new students do you get a year, on average? In the town that I teach it's normal to get 2 or 3 new students per class, in a year. This year I am up to 4 new students and am getting another new one tomorrow. (I know, this time of the year?!?) I did all the usual preparations in September for new students, but that stock pile has been taken and I had to run out tonight and get more. This now makes my total 29 second graders - 6 ELLs, 11 BSIs, and 1 autistic - and one adult. I receive BSI instruction for about 30 minutes a day and the ELL teacher pulls her students for 45 minutes a day. Anyways, I am just overwhelmed at teaching another student the class rules, procedures, and routines. Any opinions, comments, and or frustrations, too?!

Epic Teacher Fails

First and foremost, I have been twelve kinds of busy lately. So I apologize for not posting in forever. Now on to the topic at hand. Yesterday was the last day before our "spring break." As you can also note, it was the last day before Easter, so it was the day for parties and holiday festivities. I was all last minute running to Target the night before. Luckily everything I needed was on sale. I bought 96 plastic eggs for about $3 and 4 bags of jelly beans for $6. The next day my amazing parent volunteer filled all the plastic eggs up and then hid them out near our classroom. My students eagerly found all the eggs and asked the obvious question, "Can we eat the jelly beans?" I said, "Of course!" Side note: I don't like jelly beans, but these were Jolly Rancher ones and they were quite tasty. Anyways, I came back after lunch/recess to begin math. I had all these fun jelly bean math activities to do. You may already see where this is going. I had the kids eat all the jelly beans already! Needless to say EPIC TEACHER FAIL. I laughed and told them, "See teachers make mistakes, too!" I found some extra jelly beans for them to at least do some of the activity pages. Minutes later, I overheard one my best teacher friends tell her tale of the epic teacher fail. You see, her plastic eggs were filled with other types of candies, including chocolate. I should explain that usually in NJ our Easters tend to be rainy and or cold. However, yesterday was not any of the above. It was a sunny, 83 degrees. Again using inferencing, what do you think happened next? Of course, the chocolate melted in the toasty eggs. Oh well, we both laughed at our misfortune. Hopefully you liked your story Tracy!

Adjectives and similes

I have been so overwhelmed lately with all the requirements I am suppose to teach. From the Harcourt series, the school-side goals, holiday and seasonal topics. My goodness February makes me so stressed. I am trying to balance all areas and it's becoming a choose one for one day and choose something different for the next day. That is fine and dandy, but the follow through is too late, they are expected to remember too much, so the recall is lost. I am still figuring out my solution. Any ideas on how you balance the piles that we are expected to teach daily? On a different side, I have been teaching adjectives for about two weeks. Last week we did the lesson demonstrating the importance of details in writing. I gave brief sentences and clues to make a house scene similar to the one I had created earlier. Of course the students didn't get to see my picture. The whole time they kept asking the same kinds of questions: how big?, where at?, what color? It was awesome when I had them flip over their papers and create a new picture with stronger and more descriptive details. I had hoped it would work out, but was shocked when I saw that most of the students' pictures looked just like mine. They seemed to understood the point of details.

Last night I was walking my dog and POOF came some more hands on ideas to really drive adjectives in. Today I wrote tons of different adjectives on papers around the room. I had the students find a card and bring it back to their seats. They had to write a "second grade" sentence using their adjective. We did this for three rounds and then they shared their sentences. To make it even better, we did similes this week and so many kids used similes in their sentences. They were such awesome sentences!