Spring is in the Air

We're going on our field trip tomorrow, which means lots of parent visitors in the building. I convinced my teammates to take down Seuss day projects for two reasons.
1. We're a bit past his birthday.
2. I wanted to hog the wall!
Our current unit in Treasures is Growing and Changing., and I wanted to do something spring-y.  We've been noticing so much academic growth lately that I wanted the kids to get a chance to show off how they have changed. I can't type too much longer because I am so excited.

I dragged my two children to the grocery story at 6:50 am (we're an early school) to buy the cupcake liners for the middle of the daffodils.The petals each tell a growth or change, and the flowers are taped on the wall to show the child's actual height.
I'm getting ready to put the organizer and printables together. Look for this as a freebie in the stores later tonight!

Spring Freebie! Tell Everybody!

28 is good.
It's a nice number.
I trust you are all wonderful people.

Can you help some more wonderful people find me? I am offering a spring freebie for suffixes, a memory match game for words with the suffixes -ing, -less, -ful and -est. It's cute, quick and easy to laminate and cut up, and it might help one or two of your babies say, "Oh! That's what those suffixes mean!"  Tell me they don't. After you've taught it for WEEKS.  Maybe this will help.
I'd appreciate comments here and any wonderful people you know are also welcome to download or join us wonderful people.  I have turned off word verification if that is extra motivation for comments. And this download might save you some of your personal time so you can go out and enjoy the beautiful spring weather.

Click here for Duck, Duck, Caboose Memory Game Freebie

Good News, Sad News, Sad News, Good News

I haven't done a very good job of posting- or commenting on your blogs either- lately.  L:ast week was busy, but at least we had an amazing sub (my old student teacher) for Thursday and Friday. We have her in again for this week. We are giving her the page from the planbook, and she is going to teach. We don't have to write up sub plans!!!
Not too long ago, I posted about a teammate whose mother had cancer in three systems. Last week was her second week in the hospital, ans she passed away Friday morning.  My teammate doesn't like hugs. It's been almost exactly a year since her grandmother passed away.We are lucky to have wonderful supportive people in our lives but we miss them so much when they go on. I'm gonna hug her anyway.
The teaching assistant in my classroom that assists with my behaviorally challenged friends lost a pregnancy at the end of last week as well. There are two other staff members who are also pregnant and the three of them had been comparing symptoms. She will also have a hard week.

The weather has been beautiful. I think we are beyond any hope of snow. The crocuses have bloomed, the daffodils have bloomed, and yesterday I even saw irises blooming. In Maryland? In March?  We are still two weeks away from our spring break.  This week we are headed to the Natural History Museum to check out the rocks and dinosaurs. We went last year, and some of the exhibits downstairs had me totatlly lost. Hopefully I do better this year.  I think we might be a little early for the cherry blossoms, but we can hope. Have a great Monday!  I will try to get around this week.

Is it Friday Yet?

We've split classes all three days so far this week.  After we each took a day to write the sub plans for the classroom without a sub. Every night they tell us there will be a sub, and every morning there isn't. Did I mention we are then spending our planning period splitting papers and checking with the other classes to see how far they made it in case the class gets to really have class tomorrow?
The first day while I was moving furniture,  I told my kids we're having friends over. The second day they asked if we were having friends over as I rearranged the furniture. This morning one not-so-happy guy actually growled when our "friends" joined us .
It's also over 70 degrees, and that's before the extra body heat.
Tomorrow is my day to provide sub plans again, so I figured they needed something different to have extra practice graphing so...Spring Count, Tally, and Graph. Currently only at TpT.
There better be a sub.

I'm feeling vicious.

Ugly Vegetable Time

My sequencing activity for The Ugly Vegetables is up in both stores. I do not speak or read any dialects of Chinese or other Asian languages, so I worked hard to find real photographs of the vegetables in the book. I hope they are close to what the author intended.  I found some seed companies, but I'm pretty sure they would take longer than our radishes and lettuce. The kids were so excited to see the radishes sprout this week. I gave them raw turnip earlier in the year with some ranch dressing to dip it in. They loved it. I hope the lettuce is quick and the radishes are slow so we can have them both at the same time. Time to go to bed since we have to SPRING forward tomorrow.  So this weekend really is shorter than last weekend!

This will be quick

Life is happening this week. My daughter's research project for media, applications for art camp, rehearsals at the high school for the strings concert tomorrow night, trying to locate my W-2s somewhere in a stack of work that needs to be graded (I brought home a copier paper box tonight (I'm gonna find it!!)), the mass issues, and I want to finish my Ugly Vegetable activities tonight so I can laminate and cut out over the weekend.
Did I mention that my daughter forgot to pack a shirt for after dance class which ended 15 minutes before strings rehearsal so we had to go buy the first shirt in her size at Target? I didn't even look at the design before buying it.
My husband tried to fry the chicken. 3 out of 10 tenders are still brown, so 7 out of 10 moved past brown to a new color.
Time to get back to work.

Whoa!

Where did you all come from? I look down and now there are 20 followers. I am trying to comment back, but I am quite frustrated about the blog button bit. I even tried switching from mediafire to google docs, so now I am pretty sure it is a size issue.

Today in math, the coins were gone and the triple beam balance was proudly displayed. The helper of the day had a target of 100 grams. He picked an organizer station that was well over 600 grams. The class helped him revise his thinking, and then they thought maybe a reading text would be about 100 grams. ONE child said,"How about trying 100 paper clips?" "Why 100 paper clips?" I asked him (knowing full well). He replied, "If one paper clip is about a gram, then 100 paper clips should be 100 grams." The class still thinks we should try the reading text tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow two kids will tell me that we should try 100 paper clips.

I also felt bad when they read the outcomes and saw drawing conclusions. There was actual cheering. I explained that drawing conclusions would be fun, but we were not going to be drawing like in art class. They decided drawing conclusions was not as much fun as it sounded. Poor babies.

Has this been one of the worst flu seasons you can remember? Kids are sick, teachers are sick, and they are trying to bleach surfaces and have us wash and sanitize. One class today had 5 kids go home. Sick. Like sick-sick.  I don't remember ever having a winter like this. And it doesn't seem to pass quickly from child to child, but it lingers. It's not moving around a table group, it jumps all over the classroom. And it comes back around too. Hopefully your classrooms are healthy.

I am going to comment back (thank you for taking the time to comment!), work on the blog button issue, work on the grams and kilograms, and then record grades for the six assignments I graded after my committee meeting today.