Five for Fraturday

I've been away from my blog for a couple of weeks, so I thought I'd jump back in with a Five for Fraturday post. :)

I had planned to write this last night, but I'm a bit tired exhausted comatose by Friday nights. I'm sure you understand.

We had our Curriculum Night on Thursday. Ugh! I teamed up with two colleagues to present the information to parents. I'm usually the one who does most of the speaking. I've been teaching so long now that talking to parents doesn't bother me as much as it used to. Both of my colleagues are relative newbies, so it makes them more nervous to do the presentations. 

Actually, it wasn't bad. I only had five parents show from my classroom (two of them were there for one student). We don't have a huge turnout at our school. Sad.

Of course, I really stress about Parent Nights beforehand. Does my room look clean? Is it welcoming? Do I have all my handouts? Do I have enough student work up?

I was running out of wall space and time, so I decided to use an old standby for highlighting student work - Class Books! They don't have to be super-fancy and are as easy-as-pie to put together. I had two students create the cover illustrations. Then I took a large piece of construction paper, folded it in half and hole-punched it. I used a Sharpie to write the title and to credit the authors and the cover illustrators.  I hole punched the student pages and placed them inside. Three brads later and I was done. I think they look pretty good. My students and their parents enjoyed looking through them.

This one is our Constitution Day response to my poem, Our Constitution. It's part of my Constitution Day: A Celebration for Primary Grades.  It can also be found in my Patriotic Poems and Activities for Primary Grades.

The other book is student responses to my I Can Be a Scientist poem. It's part of my Science Poems and Activities for Primary Grades.

I have a confession to make. I am a piler. Yup. If I have a surface, I can put a pile of papers on it. The piles get higher as the week goes on and then I make a new pile. I would say I know where everything is, but that's not exactly true. I've searched many a pile of papers for that one important form that's due in the morning. It doesn't help that I moved rooms this year and ran out of time to set up my filing cabinet. Life is hard when you're a disorganized teacher. On the other hand, when you've got parents arriving in less than 30 minutes, that means you've got an empty file drawer in which to stuff and stash your piles. :)

So I followed up my 13-hour day on Thursday with a rainy Friday. You know what that means - the dreaded indoor recess.  Thank goodness for GoNoodle! We started out with one of the shorter Indoor Recess Mega Mixes. 

After the kids worked off some of their excess energy, I got out some of my indoor recess games for them to play with. Aside from some minor squabbles, a good time was had by all. 

These are student created pieces that the students created in art class.
A few of my kids enjoyed making new sculptures with them.

After a rather tiring week, it was nice to spend my Saturday doing little more than going to the grocery store and then coming home to watch my Gators play beat Tennessee! It was a close one, but we pulled it out in the end. Go GATORS!

I updated my Facebook profile picture to show my support.

Well, that's it for today. I hope you all have a great week!