Our Not Very Exciting Week

Maybe that's just what we needed, after both Eli and Sam visiting, and traveling out of state, and the start of school--a not very exciting week.  Things are starting to settle into our new routine now.  

Oh look!  A normal cat!  One that goes in bags and boxes.  Grumman doesn't do that, so it's been fun to watch Fiona do cat things.  She seems to be gravitating toward Josiah as her person.  

Some of the finished bookmarks from last time.  I did the project again with a different class this week.  

I'm pleased with how they turned out, and Kelly over at Kelly's Classroom Online liked them so much, she asked me to guest post on her blog.  

I also threw a map in there to make a few geography bookmarks.  I love how those turned out, so I'll be on the lookout for an old atlas I can hack up.  I'm eyeballing an old hymnal, too.  Might take a second look at some travel magazines... 

I read The Puppy Who Went to School with the kindergarten and first grade, and they painted black dogs with white paint.  The next week, I brought in simple school bus coloring pages printed on yellow paper for them to cut out.  They glued the bus and the puppy to a sheet of 11x17" construction paper so they can tell their grown ups that the puppy followed the bus to school.   (Except I notice that one child's project has the bus about to run over the dog, instead, lol.)  

Since it's September now, I changed out my August Notable Events for September ones.  

One of the teachers told me about BidRL.com, an auction site for overstocks and damaged goods.  I was able to get both the ottomans in this picture really cheap.  Trying to have enough seating so that we're not always at the tables.  

I found a new to me site with $2 books and went a little bit crazy, so I put the new titles on display as they were finished being processed.  

The girls had another visit to Shriners this week.  I hate for them to miss school so early in the year, but Hannah really needs that new leg.  We go back in 3 weeks.  

 

Our city library hauls get smaller and smaller, yet we're still surrounded by books.  

I talked about spine labels with my 3rd & 4th grade students this week.  This was actually harder for them than I anticipated, so I'll be using this worksheet with my 5th grade class and the middle schoolers, too.  The high schoolers got the lesson on the white board without the worksheet.  

I'm mostly done with my library binder.  I took pictures of the students as they checked out book the first week, and now I have all the students name, photo, and barcode sorted by class, so that I can have that class' pages open when they come in, and scan their barcode to check their books out, without having to ask, "What's your name again?"  

This is super helpful to me, because I struggle with names, and now I'm having to learn 100 of them all at once.  (What's Katie got going on here, fashion wise?  She decided to wear her PE uniform under her clothes that day.  The funny thing is, I noticed the hem of her shorts peeking out from under her skirt that day, and totally missed the shirt weirdness until I saw the picture later.)  

Next week's lesson plans include a review of fiction/non-fiction, and an insect related craft.  There's a lion craft I want to do, too, but I have yet to sit and chop 3 skeins of yarn into little bitty pieces.  Maybe a little mindless television is in order.