The Good Days With The Bad.....In One Day

Had an incredibly wonderful "I love my job" moment this morning and a not so incredible "this is what I hate about my job" moment this afternoon.

Good:  I had the first of my required observations this first thing this morning and my class worked nearly perfectly for an entire hour.  Pretty sure I didn't have to reprimand or remind a single child of proper classroom behavior or to get back to work.  They were FANTASTIC!!!

Bad:  Made a girl cry.  :(  Gave a spelling retest today and caught one of my little third graders cheating.  She said that her parents had promised to take her for ice cream if she got 100%. There were two words that were pretty tricky and she had written them on the back of her hand during the test.  I told her I couldn't regrade her test because she'd cheated despite her claims that it was an "accident" the words were written on her hand.  When she begged me to retake it a 2nd time I told her no.  We are only allowed to retake it once.

Does that make me a mean teacher?  Maybe, but I would bet she will think again before cheating.  She cried for the next ten minutes and I had several of my kids come tell me, very worriedly, "she's crying and I can't figure out what's wrong!"  Glad I have such thoughtful students but I had to tell them I knew why and to just leave her be for a while.

A Start To An Excellent Year!!!

Oh my goodness, it's been two weeks now and I can't believe how great this year is going to be!!!  My students are so fantastic.  They are such quiet workers, good listeners, helpful students, so responsible and great leaders!  Sometimes,  I don't know what to do with myself they are so great!  After a summer full of working EFY (Especially For Youth - a summer LDS Youth camp), I had a blast organizing my classroom this year before school started.  Here's a few sneak peaks:

 Reading Corner

 Get to Know You Beach Ball

 All ready for the first day! 

 We learned about Captain Dependable to help us learn about being responsible.

 One of my cute girls gave this pencil to me last week!

 Our School Supply Giving Tree for BTS Night

This past Thursday, our school had Back to School Night and kicked off our new Leader in Me changes at the school.  We started the night with a Ribbon Cutting Ceremony where our Student Leaders introduced some of the new changes we have at our school.

Our third grade team with Simba the Sabertooth!

As we were heading into the school to gather in the gym, a parent from last year came and told me this sweet story.   Her son, Boston, was in my class last year and I guess had a crush on me.  He tells his mom every time he sees someone pretty he says, "She's pretty but not as pretty as Miss Wiser."  That definitely melted my heart and gave me a unique insight into the minds of children. They are so genuinely loving and sincere in their interactions with others.  I sure love my job and learning from these beautiful children.

5 More Days!

So we only have a few days left!  We've had lots of great adventures the past few weeks.  Just wanted to share a few.

First, we had an ice cream party to celebrate passing off our multiplication.  The kids got a certain number of toppings based off what they passed off in class.  Then we had a bunch of parents who helped scoop ice cream and toppings for each child.  They had a blast and we spent the rest of the afternoon outside with them playing on the playground.  I had one parent come and tell me we made them look bad cause they don't play with their kids that way.  I laughed and told her that's because we can send them home at the end of the day and sleep!  :)

Then, yesterday we were cleaning out our workroom to make room for our new reading program next year.  Our principal told us to be generous throwing things out because we probably have things hidden from when the school was first built 40 years ago.  We had a blast yesterday, reading some of the stories we found, and then we discovered this beauty!!

We had such a laugh when we found this!  We even put a bow on it and wrote a card that said "To Michele, Love, 1974" and put it in her office.  I sure hope she had a good laugh from it like we did!

Mother's Day

I know this is a little late but here was our fun project for Mother's Day!  The kids and I had fun doing these.  :)

Creative Period

Hey guys!  It's been QUITE a while.  I can't believe we only have 33 days left of school!!!  We finally have Spring Break this week and so tomorrow's the last day this week. I'm just about as done with school right now as my kids.  Sound familiar?  Well, in order to preserve my sanity I have done zero grading this past week and instead have focused my efforts on my creative talents!  We recently read a book about dependability.  Remember those old "Standin' Tall" books about various topics?  Well, we listened to it on tape!  I love this book and the way its read and sung on the tape.  My only problem with the book is that the incredible illustrations are all in black and white!  Who does that??  So, I fixed it! :)  I began coloring in the illustrations in my personal copy and when it took me nearly two hours just to do the characters in the first page, I decided that I would leave the background black and white and just color the characters in the picture.  Here's some of my favorite pages:

 Professor "Un" and his henchmen

 Oh no!  Professor Un has locked Reggie & Katrina out in space!

Don't worry!  Captain Dependable will help to save the day!

Fun, right?  RIGHT!  For those who know me, they know that my stress reliever and all time favorite past time is reading, followed closely by COLORING!  This has been such a fun project!  I really enjoyed thinking about the perspectives, lighting, shading, etc.  What a good chance to develop my artistic skills.

But, wait?  There's still one more day to Spring Break.  How, you might ask, will you manage another day with this project completed?  Well, let me tell you!  My awesome fantastic, incredible, fun, amazing, perfect team and I have started working on getting our books together for next year.  We were looking at the cursive book today and are reworking what pages we want in it for next year and looked at some of the pictures on the pages.  After much laughter, we realized that while some of them are adorable, some of them are just weird.  Now my team knows my love for art and turned to me.  "Becka, would you fix these pictures and make a cute cover?"  Do I even need to tell you my answer?????  I came home and immediately started working on them.  The cover's not quite finished, it still needs the title but you can see the cute turtle I used.  We found this on one of the pages that we would not be using in the book but LOVED the turtle so I thought it would work well on our cover!

 The original monkey's weird, right?  

 Does that look like an x-ray?  I really struggled with that one!

Here's our cover turtle.  It'll say:  "Racing into Cursive!"

Apparently, I'm not the only one who's been feeling crafty.  I had one of my girls come in with her mom yesterday morning and brought me a gift.  She had painted this adorable little mug for me...and of course its an owl!  :)

Before I sign off, here's a little chuckle I had the other day:  Our classes were getting ready to switch (the morning class was going to Chinese and my afternoon class was just leaving and coming to me) which normally involves quite a bit of chaos.  This day was no different and as the morning class filed out, I caught a bit of one boy's thinking process.  I'm not sure where this thought came from because we had not been talking about the topic AT ALL that day and he wasn't having a conversation to anyone, he just was talking to himself.  I heard him say, "I don't think it was fair that Cinderella went to the ball."  He said nothing else, and just grabbed his backpack and tote tray and walked out.  I know we're not supposed to have favorites, but I seriously think he is mine this year!  He's the cutest kid, so full of energy, enthusiasm, cheer, and is so completely RANDOM!! :)  

Halloween

We had such a blast on Halloween and luckily it was a short day for us! The next day was a grading day for the end of term and I'm so glad we got to send them home early. My team and I decided to do a theme as a grade for our costumes. We were all characters from Peter Pan so the day before we had a reading party for those who had enough reading minutes and we watched the movie. Here's our awesome costumes:

We had Tinkerbell, Tiger Lily, Peter Pan, Peter's Shadow, and Captain Hook

Happy Halloween from Southland's 3rd Grade!!

Glasses

I have to say that I always think it's funny when I wear glasses for the first time in a school year.  :)  Today, my students acted like I was a completely different person!  They were absolutely stunned that I had glasses and...I don't know how else to explain their reaction.  I even had one girl come up to me first thing and with all seriousness said, "Miss Wiser, did you know you are so beautiful?!"  Needless to say, she definitely made my day!  And in case you care, here's a picture of my outfit for today: