Thursday -- WOW

The cool thing about bloggy friends is that they like you, even when you are a day (or more) late to a party (which would be unacceptable in real life).

The rules are different in blog-land.

Emily from Curious Firsties is awesome that way. She hosts a party, hoping people show up. No RSVP needed. Come as you are and when you can.

So, here I am. 

1. The drawing/coloring rubric lesson from earlier in the week has impacted our class with gusto!! Yesterday a sweet friend brought me this paper.

(It is actually really small, as in a quarter sheet of copier paper.)

He wanted to know if it was a 3 or a 4 on the scale. We walked right over to where the rubric hangs on our wall and compared it to each paper. Starting with 1 and moving up to 4. We decided that it should be a four. "Because it is snowing, that is why there is so much white, that is the setting," he told me.

Can you see my jumping around? I was pretty excited and still am.

2. Have you heard? There is cold weather around these parts (and most likely yours, too). That means, no homeroom walking, head to the gym/cafeteria to dance.

We have our list of songs and dances that we know, and wherever the spirit leads, that is the song that is played.

Today our last song started. The Sid Shuffle.

We've done this dance a lot, so the kids are very familiar with it. But this is what was different today.

150 kids and grown ups dancing. 100+ kids singing along with the words. It was music to my ears. I grinned a lot.

3. Our class got pen pals this week.

Last week at a training my buddy, Mrs. Jones, and I tossed around the idea of pen pals. I joked that maybe I could write letters to my good friend from Ohio (First Grade Critter Cafe's Julie Marciniak).

I didn't really want to do it, because, well, what if her kids are better than mine, or my kids don't show well?

But somehow, Ms. Marciniak got wind of this wack-a-mole idea and loved it.

Ok, I will pull out my best writing instruction of writing a letter and give it a go. We did it today. The lesson went great and I was feeling pretty good about their end products.

Then I looked at them an hour later, and started thinking--how in the world can I send these to Ohio? Oh, why oh why did I agree to this????

Just now I looked at them, with a rubric in hand. Gave some scores. Then compared to what they did in October. And bless my soul, these kiddos have improved!!!

So now I am excited to mail these letters tomorrow, because no matter what we get in return, I know that my kiddos are not stagnating. They are making progress.