installation fail...now to muster up excitement for the 13th

let's see...where to begin? i guess i will begin with the fact that i was really happy about my students' work on their comprehension/vocabulary tests this week-i know we still have a lot of work to do.

and after school yesterday, i had to go to an impromptu meeting about our garden installation. there was a mini tour of where everything was going to be in the garden, and what our jobs were to be. please understand me when i say i am not super excited about installing the garden. i WANT the garden, and i am excited to use it to TEACH, but quite honestly it's exhausting to wake up at 6 and work on a saturday--

this is the beginning of our mini pond-awaiting plants and fishies

 it's mapped out and it will be super cool when all is said and done-we were so fortunate to have bank of america donate toward this adventure!

recognition can be a beautiful thing...very classy donor-recognition stone!

 and as people were chit-chatting about something and i was dying to move on (i might be a little impatient..maybe) i noticed our 'reading resource room' shelves. 

hippy shelves...does that mean the shelves believe in peace, hope and love, or that they need a bigger waist size

we left on the note that if it was raining steady at 6:20, they would update the website to let people know that the installation would be postponed until the 13th. so...this morning i was up at 6 to get ready and at 6:37 i checked and sure enough, there was an email saying that it was canceled. on the one hand i was happy to go back to bed. on the other hand i was not thrilled that i had gotten up and dressed, but the boys were happy to go back to bed, as was i! as i was closing my eyes, i had a text, and it was my principal; could i swing by sometime this morning b/c she had something to show me that i might be excited about...i bit, i was intrigued.

i went back to sleep and woke up around 9:30-ish and headed over to school. when i got there, 3 of our rotc kids from the middle school feeder were there to let people know we h rescheduled. i went inside, and dr. hughes opened a locked closet, and pulled out this big ol' case with a lock on it (it was like one of those james bond suitcases, and i was wondering if it came with handcuffs and a secret mission); my principal has the hook-ups! we now have access to i-pod touches for the 4th grade! the only catch is that we film the projects that we do with our kiddos. creative and fun. there are only like 13, but i understand there are 10 more that we can access from the library. good times.

i went from the school to petsmart because i had to get dog food. well, i am a sucker...

but it's always worth it to see them smile.

i thought about costumes, but then i looked at the prices and decided that if they want to start taking out the trash and vacuuming, i would pay them an allowance and they can get their own costumes-i should not enable them...

instead i spent too much money on their treats and crinkly ghost toys...

i was playing with the timer tonight and chaco did NOT like the alarm i picked.he was barking at the i touch..in fact he was so unimpressed that he moved to a different room after barking at me and the device.

it took a little convincing to get him to come back.

i did get to do some paper editing today. the kids peer revised, then edited their drafts this week for certain things, and i wanted to see how they did. well, i'm actually pretty happy with the results. ex....cept one. there was one paper about going to the zoo. in and of itself, that's great. these are supposed to be personal narratives, so when it got to the part where they were watching the lions, and the lions ate a woman and took the hand off of a man and broke another woman's feet...then everyone went running...i don't remember reading anything about that in the news. i think we might have to have a chat to clarify. obviously someone didn't pick up on what a personal narrative is.

i am excited that this week is the end of the first six weeks-i cannot believe how quickly it went by..even though it feels like i've been back in school for about 3 months! i can't believe it's time to change the calendar again!! i've been using the scooby doo stickers to reward agenda signatures-fun leading up to halloween! the kids like them and they look to see what their partner got...dear gigi, i still give them out at random...i have become very intentional at mixing it up if they got a cool sticker the day before or a so-so sticker...smiles.

yesterday i gave my kids the talk about not opting out (since that was our professional development) and they looked at me like i was a crazy lady. probably because i never let them opt out anyway, so this was nothing new to them. but what was even more important was sharing with them some statistics about reading every day. i gave them some fluency stats and the daily reading stats-hopefully it has some impact on some of them. i mean just reading about 15 minutes a day they will have read about 1,400,000 words in a year...i think they were impressed by the big number, but we'll see if it makes them want to be more successful or not.

may you always receive the cool stickers,
julie