What I'm thankful for

I'm joining the linky party at What the Teacher Wants. I have so much to be thankful for I'm not even sure where to start.
1.  What are you thankful for in your classroom?

• for all my students. They make me laugh and smile everyday with their excitement about learning.
• For the supportive community I live in. I'm so lucky to be a part of a school where the community is so supportive. 
• My coworkers and adminstration
• My promethean board and document camera. I don't know what I'd do with out these.

2. What person are you most thankful for?

• I can't pick just one person. I'm so thankful for my parents. They are super supportive of everything I do and my class.
• My sister who is my best friend who is always willing to help me and my students out
• My boyfriend, Chris. I'm so thankful I finally found my other half. It took a long time to find him but it was worth the wait. He listens to me ramble on and on about school and blogging and lets me drag him around to different places so I can recreate what I saw on someone's blog. He's my number one supporter. 
• My niece Sophie who amazes me with all she has learned and how smart she is.

See I said I couldn't pick just one.
3. What 3 blogs are you most thankful for?

• Rowdy in First Grade - Jennifer helped me so much by answering questions I had about all kinds of blogging related stuff.
• Can Do Kinders - Pam has been so supportive and encouraging with my adventure in blogging.
• Kinder Kraziness - She happened to list me as one of the blogs she's grateful for but I'm truly grateful for Laura. She's been such a help and encouragement.

Picking only three was very hard, but I tried to stick to it.

4. What guilty pleasure are you most thankful for?

• Pinterest - I can get sucked in for a long time on that site but I enjoy every second of it.

5. What are you most thankful for?
That I'm able to worship God in any way I want to and God loved me enough to send his son to die on the cross.

What the Teacher Wants!

The End of Molasses Classes Part 3

I'm a little late with linking up to this part of the book but I've been busy.
I'm a huge Harry Potter fan. I love the books so much (the movies not as much.) So I absolutely loved principle #50 Set an electric tone on day 1. I love the fact that they have houses at their school and they go through a sorting hat like ceremony. It got me thinking about doing something like this with my class. I have groups but they are usually pretty fluid and I don't tie everything in with them. But after reading this section it made me want to develop some kind of point system for my students. I have my kids for 2 years and the more they can bond and learn to work together the better. I only wish I had started reading this book this summer rather than a month or two ago. But there is always next year.
The next principle that really caught my attention was #65 Encourage children to cheer for one another. I love teaching kindergarten and first grade for this very reason. They are proud of each other when they accomplish things. I have one student in my  class who is always encouraging other students when they move their clip up. They are also good about encouraging the ELL students when they answer questions or talk more. I love the idea of encouraging this more instead of just allowing it to happen naturally.
I really struggled with the principle about dressing the part. I believe that we as teachers we need to take ourselves seriously so that others will. That if we want to be treated as professionals we need to act professional. But I also think I teach Kindergarten and dressing in a suit everyday just doesn't work. My first three years teaching, I taught in a school where we could only wear jeans on Fridays. I had to dress more professionally but I also taught 3rd grade. It bothered me when other teachers would wear velour track suits and that was ok. But where I'm at now, we don't have much of a dress code. We can wear jeans whenever. I try not to dress sloppy and for only comfort.  But to be honest, I spend a lot of time on the floor with my kids and for some reason they tend to get me dirty with paint, mayonnaise (true story. One little girl got mayo in my hair my first year in kindergarten.), snot, fruit roll up. I can't afford the dry cleaning bill that it would take to clean my suits. But I think if I taught an older grade, I would be more likely to wear more professional clothes.
I'm linking up with the TBA book club. Come check out others' thoughts on this awesome book.

Check out what we did for P week!

Before I tell you all about p week, I wanted to remind you to enter my giveaway if you haven't yet. You have until I get up tomorrow morning to enter. I'll do the drawing tomorrow on randomnumber.org. Click here if you haven't entered the giveaway yet for a chance to win a $10.00 gift card for Dollar Tree.

Today was our pumpkin day. I tried to make everything be all about pumpkins and it worked out pretty well. I used one of Mrs. Wills' October math journals where the kids had to make a pattern out of tall and short pumpkins. We read 5 little pumpkins and illustrated it. Then we read the book Pumpkins by Ken Robbins. I just got my document camera and slate this week and haven't gotten to play with too much. So I was excited to use it today to show the pictures from the book to the kids. This is a great book if you haven't checked it out. The photographs are beautiful. We then made a tree map of pumpkins. I've been so impressed with how well my students are taking to these different thinking maps. Thanks to all my blogging friends who've inspired me to try these out.

Then it was time for some science. I put on my lab coat to let the kids know it was science time. The first question was will a pumpkin float? They put their names under yes or no depending on what they thought. One little boy said no because it's heavy. I was pretty proud of him for coming up with a reason for his answer. The pumpkin didn't float. We then measured it and compared it's weight to the candy pumpkins. They made their predictions and I recorded it on a chart. The last question we answered was how many seeds are in the pumpkin. I started to carve into the top of the pumpkin and my knife wasn't quite sharp enough. Some of my kids were talking about how I was hurting the pumpkin and then one little girl yelled out "Ms. Kerri wouldn't murder anyone." I was glad for her vote of confidence. They each helped me scoop out some of the seeds. We didn't have a chance to count them yet so we'll have to finish that Monday. We did make our pumpkin glyphs that I posted about earlier this week. Again, it was the perfect opportunity to use my document camera. They did a pretty good job with it and I loved having the camera to display my model as I did each part.

I didn't quite get everything done I had wanted to. I still have some fantastic activities from Kreative in Kinder's fall pack to do for math. We can work on those next week. I never seem to have enough time. I also plan to do a whole unit on Pete the Cat that I'm super excited about.
What did you do in your class this week?
I'm participating in Clutter Free Class room's Linky party. Check out the other posts here.

A peek at my week

I have not keep with my blogging this week. I've been sooooo busy. I had my first evaluation and it went really well but I was still stressed out about it. I'm having some trouble balancing all the things I want to do with my kids. I see so many good ideas out in the blogging world that I want to try and I get a little too gung ho. We just had a lot going on this week. Our unit in reading is about friendship. Our letter is s, so I wanted to do some spider activities. Then we had a field trip on Tuesday about our five senses.
Here's a couple of pictures from our trip:

This is the talking chimeny. The kids get the funniest look on their faces when it talks to them.

One of their finds when using their sense of sight like the owls.

One of the students using his sense of touch to hug a tree.

Three units is kind of hard to pull off. Luckily friendship is a 3 week unit in reading so I can pull a few of the ideas I've been wanting to do. This week we worked on a kind word lesson. I can't find where I saw the original idea. I've looked several times so if you know the source please let me know. I like to give credit. I drew a picture of Fred, the friendly guy. After talking about what friends do together, we talked about what kind of words friends say to each other. I let them say all the negative things and they crinkled up Fred. Then we said kind words and they smoothed him down. We talked about how those unkind words stick around. I hung Fred up by our clip chart. I overheard one of the girls say that every time they go back there they should smooth Fred out a little bit more. It was so cute.

Here's our Fred the friendly guy. Sorry the picture is so dark.

 My big Friday plan was to work on some spider activities. But as it turned out, my day was completely derailed by a health fair.  Which during this health fair, one of my students turned blue because he was having trouble breathing. We finally made it back to the classroom with about 30 minutes of instruction time and we did a few of the spider activities quickly. We did an awesome experiment from Deanna Jump's Simple Science Volume 1. We talked about why spider don't stick to their webs and read Eric Carle's The Busy Spider. We also completed a tree map about spiders. I had plans of us making webs and drawing and labeling a spider. Maybe we'll get to finish up next week.

Here's are tree map of spiders. I thought the kids came up with good ideas for our first one.

After art, we went outside and one of kids fell off  and hurt himself. I dropped him off at the nurse because he's usually pretty capable of making it back to the classroom. It was time for my 12:30 kids to go home and I go to the nurse to get him and he's not there. I see the nurse and she said she had sent him back to the classroom. He never made it and he wasn't in the hallway. I checked the office and he wasn't there either. I was in full panic mode at this point. It turned out he had gone outside the school and was just standing and crying. His mom happened to be picking him up early today so she was there. I'm pretty sure I had years take off my life today. Anyway, that's a peek into my crazy week.
I hope to get some scheduled posts written this weekend with some freebies. So check back later. I'm only 6 followers away from my first giveaway.

Check out what other bloggers have done in their classroom this week by going to The Clutter-Free Classroom's Linky Party. 

I'm so excited!

Over at Rowdy in First Grade, Jennifer has challenged bloggers to post something positive today. This is my effort at meeting that challenge.
I have had a hard time staying positive so far this year. It feels like we go a step forward and then 2 steps back. But I'm determined to keep a good attitude. So here are some things I'm excited about:

• I'm really excited about scrapbook paper. It can make anything look prettier. I've redone my center chart using scrapbook paper and the kids pictures. I also took boring old coffee cans and turned them into pretty containers for markers.
• Today we used m and m's for math.The kids sorted them, counted them, and then ate a couple. 
• Blogging. I love reading everyone's blogs and getting great new ideas. I feel like I'm a much better teacher already just by using the ideas and inspiration found on other blogs.
• Pete the Cat and Pete the Cat Rocking His School Shoes. I introduced my class to Pete the cat last week and they loved him. When we had open house, one little girl had to show her grandmother the book. She gave me the money to get the new Pete the Cat book. We're loving them both in Ms. Kerri's class.
• Fall is coming soon. I love Fall and Halloween and Thanksgiving. I look forward to all the fun activities going on and beautiful leaves and decorations.
• Nieces. I have the cutest niece in the world. Sophie. Yesterday she was blowing me kisses when we left. Plus she really loves the Dr. Jean song "Banana Dance." We do the ketchup one all the time. My boyfriend also has the sweetest niece Kaley who is getting to be a lot of fun. She's almost 4 months old and she's so smiley.
• Dr. Jean songs
• That I'm finally starting to get in a routine at school. We've been through half a week of centers and it's going well.

I don't know why my pictures are so wonky. But those are some positives in my life. What's going well in yours? Join the linky party.