General life in the classroom

Okay.... So much for getting a blog done every week, huh? We finished the first quarter and all seemed to have survived parent teacher conferences. I had about half of my students and their parents show up. Its interesting to see the difference between the parent teacher conferences in Oregon and up here... In Oregon it seems that many parents are more concerned with how well their child is doing academically in addition to behaviorally. Many of the parents I talked to here were solely concerned with their child's behavior in the classroom. Thats not to say that they don't value the academic side at all, it just seemed that it was less of a priority.

We also have been celebrating all sorts of fun things like Halloween, and the end of the first quarter and earning a cupcake party for good behavior in school. I have a student with some serious food allergies and his mom volunteered to make the cupcakes for us... I was SO impressed with what she brought....

Some of the kids wore costumes to school, others brought them for the afternoon costume parade. Me?? I was ALL decked out in my super awesome Power Ranger costume with Jana, Michael, Zoey and Sarah. We got a few pictures on the night of the Halloween carnival, but sadly Jana was too busy setting up for the Haunted House that we didn't get a picture of all 5 of us...

 I'm most proud of my belt.... Freakin awesome...

POWER UP!

I bought a pumpkin for my kids to dig into and work together to carve... I was amazed that NONE of them liked pulling the seeds out of the pumpkin... Thats my FAVORITE part!! Anyway, they weren't interested... We did some counting of seeds and you would have thought I'd asked them to put their heads in the toilet or something... Ha.

We're still working on routine in our room... Perhaps I need to be more strict with routine, but I'm struggling with that... Any suggestions would be helpful! :)

We were VERY excited to get a video from Miranda, Arden and Jordan... I had called and asked them to make a video, per Jana's request. Jana's class was learning all about natural disasters and Jana asked me to come talk to her kids about fighting fire... So my dear cousin Adam sent some pictures, and they kids LOVED it... I had Mirn and the crew make a video for us. Totally HYSTERICAL!!! I loved it, and I watched it probably more than 5 times... The kids loved it too. They thought it was so cool to see them spray the water and drive the heavy around.

My class was also very excited to receive a letter from a class in North Carolina. They are learning about leaves and they sent letters to different states and countries. I emailed the teacher back and said we were already a few weeks into snowfall, but if we could find any fallen leaves we'd send them. The kids thought it was cool to see leaves from somewhere totally different. They also loved getting dressed up (putting on snow pants, coat, gloves, hat, boots) to go out and look for some leaves. We did find some that were wet, but still in one piece. We have been pressing those for a few days now. They're probably ready to be glued to some card stock and sent to that class. Here is a picture from our leaf walk.

That just about covers it for this month... I'll REALLY try to be better about posting more about life in the classroom... I'll leave you with a few more pictures of my sweet munchkins playing in one of the first snows of the year.