Five for Frunday

It’s Five for Frunday!

I just made that up.

I can do that.

 

“I like butterflies.  Are they realy made of butter? . . . I know there not it’s just funny.”

I shared this journal entry on Instagram this week because I died laughing when I read it after school.  THIS KID!  And if you look closely at the picture, it’s a stick of butter with wings!  Ha!

This is from The Moffatt Girls’ Journal Prompts for Beginning Writers.  I love them!  We don’t start until December and we use the sentence starters for a couple of months.  Then we use the blank pages for the rest of the year.  I love that it gets my kids writing every single day no matter what.  First, my kids complete a page of their morning work, and then they write in their journals.  I let my kids write about whatever they want.  So if they don’t want to write about insects (as pictured above) and want to write about Star Wars, it’s perfectly okay.

But they can’t say I don’t know what to write about because I come right back at them with Write three sentences about one of the pictures on your page.

No one ever says I don’t know what to write about anymore because they must have heard me say that about sixteen million times the first month we started these.

I check these over quickly at the end of each day (or during my lunch) and rate them with our Four Star Writing Rubric.

Each morning, after announcements, I show the kiddos the next journal page and we go over the word/picture bank together.  I take that opportunity to share one Four Star journal entry from the day before.

That works two ways.  1) I’m showing the students what I expect.  2) We’re sharing journals.  Because as much as I want to say I make time for us to share our journals, I don’t.

Because sharing our journals takes a long time.

And I don’t like it.

And yes, I could have one table group come up each day, or have a rotation schedule, or this or that, but I’m telling you right now, I am confessing this to you – I DO NOT LIKE IT.

Some of the kids are excited about it, some aren’t, some can’t find the page they want to share, and others stand in front of the room unable to read what they wrote because they honestly have no clue what they wrote, and they spelled everything so phonetically that it makes absolutely NO SENSE AT ALL and I already pulled them aside and went over how to find some of the words in our dictionaries and on the word wall and around the room and I CAN’T TAKE IT.

There.

 

For the first time ever, I did a Lucky Charms math activity for St. Patrick’s Day.  Seriously.  FIRST TIME EVER.  I didn’t know how it would go logistically.  I didn’t want to sort the marshmallows and make sure everyone had enough.  I didn’t want to count the cereal and make sure it was all fair and square.

I have no idea where I got this printable, other than my teammate copied it for me, another teammate picked up the Lucky Charms for me, and I just bagged it all up.

I worried for nothing.  I told my kids hey, I have a life, I live outside of this classroom, I just poured the cereal into a baggie and you are going to survive if the person next to you has more rainbow marshmallows than you or more of anything than you.

And I don’t care.

So just do it.

And then eat it.

And then we’ll say we did math.

And they agreed!  And it was great!

My room smelled DEE-LICIOUS!

I think I might do it again next year if all the stars align and my teammates do all the work for me again.

😉

If you haven’t read about The Bucket, these next two pictures will not make sense.

After I blogged about the fact that EVERYONE NEEDS A BITMOJI, Steve’s aunt created one immediately and now she and I text almost only in Bitmoji.

And she sent me this yesterday:

 

And then she sent this:

Which, luckily, no one did actually do that in the bucket.

But it is a true statement.

🙂 🙂 🙂

Last night, Steve and I met my parents for dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.  We were celebrating my dad’s upcoming birthday in a double date sort of way.

The food was amazing and we ate and ate and ate.  I also got to have wine from the Willamette Valley in Oregon and I LOVE wine from Oregon.  I don’t know why, but I do.  Our friends, Mike and Susan, introduced Oregon wine to us and it’s hard to get it out here in California.  It was a super yummy Pinot Noir and went very well with my Lobster Tail.  😉

Better than the food was the company, though.  We had the best time and the best conversation and laughed a lot!  I thought have the waitress take our picture three different times throughout the evening and then I was either too busy talking or too busy eating or too busy listening to actually remember to say it out loud.

So I don’t have a picture, goshdarnit.

But I have the memories.

And the left over cheesecake!  🙂

I caught up on my correspondence today.

Ha!

I have four birthdays coming up.

March 26 is my nephew’s birthday, March 27 is my dad’s birthday and my friend’s birthday (Susan, the one who introduced me to Oregon wine), and my aunt’s birthday is on March 28.

I KNOW!

So I took care of a little writing and stamping and sealing this morning.

And that’s about it.

You’re all caught up on my life.

How’s yours going?