Our Teacher Appreciation Week

The downside of working mornings only is that I leave before the taco bar happened.  Which is a bummer, because I love tacos.  

But I did get my door decorated, which was a fun surprise.  

I was hanging out with Jack in his room when I noticed Grumman camped out in a pile of his laundry.  Weirdo.  He also loves the smell of warm shoes.  

I read the kindergarten class If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and we painted paper plates to look like chocolate chips.  I wore my Mouse a Cookie dress that day, but didn't get a picture this year.  

City library run.  

Coming to the end of my second year of library, I finally had a light bulb moment and made myself a binder for the leftover coloring pages I had stuffed in my desk drawer.  

My preschoolers get a take home coloring page related to the book we read each week.  But there's often extras due to kids being absent.  

It occurred to me that instead of reinventing the wheel every single week, next year I could make copies of coloring sheets I've already used when I read the same book again to a new class.  I'm looking forward to this saving me some lesson planning time next year.  

So, back in December, Paul ordered a truck.  

It's finally here, and we went and picked it up this week.  

We don't get much wildlife in our suburban neighborhood.  So when I saw this turkey walking down our street, I took a picture.  

Crayon & watercolor with my 3rd graders

I wore my London skirt in honor of Coronation weekend, so it seemed appropriate to pull out the Kings and Queens of England book.  

Not sure why this picture only partially uploaded, but I'm thrilled that my Sam flowers (a type of lily) are coming up again.  He gave them to me as a birthday or Mother's Day gift a couple years ago.  

I think Fiona is influencing Grumman.  He never played in boxes, but Fiona loves boxes.  After she hopped out of this one, he had to get in and see what all the fuss was about.  

 And that's all for this week!  

The End of Catching Up on April

Okay, so yesterday we left off with the cats and the bunny.  Let's see...

Jack showed me a sign he placed.  Being the proud mama, I took a picture.  

The spring Fine Arts Fundraiser occurred.  The sign on the left says ART in the Library.  Other teachers also posted samples of art from their classrooms.  

Oh, there's the crabby ocean scenes I mentioned yesterday!  I read the kids Eric Carle's Home for a Hermit Crab the week that they colored the crabs, then the following week we did the cut, paste, embellish parts.  There was glitter and sequins involved.  I'm pretty sure the janitor sighs a lot when he vacuums the library.  

There were drama, choir, and hand chime performances to go along with the visual arts.  

And dessert was served.  

I mentioned that I haven't been home Friday mornings lately.  I'm getting weekly iron infusions.  Turns out there are things besides motherhood that can cause exhaustion.  Who knew?

Our local adoption support group puts on a respite camp weekend for the kids.  I was so excited to get spots for the girls this year.  This was Hannah playing with sticks (she enjoyed whacking the trees--free therapy!) while we waited for official drop off time.  

And Katie with a branch.

Drop off was Friday afternoon.  

I helped her carry her stuff.  

Pick up was supposed to be Sunday afternoon.  

Saturday, we got a call that Katie was refusing to walk to the dining hall.  That she was being non-compliant.

2 hours later, we got the "she's sick, come get her" call.

I ended up picking them both up because I had no desire to spend 5 hours in the car 3 days in a row.  

Hannah and I went grocery shopping, and since she'd missed out on s'mores night, we got the ingredients to make them at home.  

Hannah got Hershey's bars; I decided to try using Ghiardelli squares instead.

It's not the campfire with friends experience, but 

they were still tasty.

Jack had some, too.

Miss Hannah had a birthday.  

She was full from dinner and asked if we could save "cake" for the next night.

Hence the costume change between presents and turtle pie with flames.

I printed and laminated some button placing pages from Twinkl to use with my K students.  

I tell them we're exercising their Lego muscles when we do things like this (threading beads on a pipe cleaner is another fun one we did recently).  

We're getting so close to the end of the school year that everybody's a little more keyed up than usual.  The weather got nice and good behavior went right out the window.  It's cooler this week, so hopefully we're be able to reign it back in a little bit.  
 

Happy May! Let's Catch Up on April

I used to blog on Friday mornings, but I haven't been home the past few.  So once again, I've gone longer between posts than I intended to.  

My Easter/spring bulletin board.  Students made the butterflies, using watercolor on coffee filters.  

Gotta take pictures of the bunny on Easter, right.  

I feel like it's been a while since I showed Tuzi.  

I was requesting books about Native Americans, in preparation for a discussion of the original inhabitants of the lands we'll be passing through on our summer trip.  The NA craft book caught my eye and I added it to the batch with an evil smile.  I'm not sure why they hate it so much, but I really feel like it's good problem solving practice for the girls.  Pictured above is Hannah's twig horse (deer?) that refused to stand on it's own.  

And here's Katie's project.

It reminds me a little of a Swedish Dala horse.  It's fascinating to me that cultures around the world have similar crafts.  Someone shared Italian papercutting on Facebook recently, and I was reminded of papercutting in both China and Mexico.  

I was not delighted to place this order.  Uniform buying with 8 weeks of school left is not my favorite.  But Katie had either lost, destroyed, stained, or outgrown most of her unis.  The way things usually work, if she managed to keep these nice to the end of the year (the tan skirt is already stained) she'd have a huge growth spurt over the summer and not be able to wear them next school year anyway.  :sigh:  

Tried something new!  I made white bean/chicken chili, and we liked it.  Yeah for a new menu item in our boring repertoire.  

I know I missed pictures of at least 2 library piles.  

We had an anniversary.  

Josiah was going for "bird nest" cupcakes, which we've made with jelly beans in the past (and green coconut).  But the only jelly beans I found were red, so they turned out looking more like holly/Christmas cupcakes.  

The weather has been beautiful, so I took Grumman out for a stalk in the back yard.  

I don't think I have a shot of the finished product, but we made hermit crabs in ocean scenes (it was a 2 week project), and one of my first graders called his "Scrachy" for some reason, which tickled my funny bone.  

Processing some new books for the library.

At some point we'll have a biography of every president.  That day is not today.  Tomorrow's not looking good, either.  

I was struck by the size difference between Fiona (left) and Grumman (right).  He's so much taller and longer than she is, yet they're the same weight.  

I picked up some new snapdragons to fill in the hole between the middle yellow section and the right yellow section.  There's some babies growing there from seed, too, so it should fill in a bit soon.  I'm concerned we're going to lose the plant on the right this year, though.  They last about 3-4 years here, which is great, but they've started to look withered and dry, and they're not bouncing back.  

We read dinosaur poems for poetry month so I wore my dino skirt.  

Paul had Katie pull some weeds as a consequence for an issue at school.  

I took Tuzi's cage outside to give it a good cleaning, and Grumman was so offended that I was outside, and the bunny was outside, and he was stuck in the house.  

Fiona availed herself of the opportunity to check out the bunny cage, since the lid was open.  

Fortunately, Tuzi was still outside in the playpen when she did that.  

Not to be outdone, Grumman had to weird out over the playpen box.  

This is where I'm going to split the post so it doesn't end up being a mile long.  More pictures tomorrow.