1st grade : Language Arts : Valentine's Day letter-writing activity.

My first graders are just about to finish a unit on letter-writing this week, so imagine my joy and surprise when I found this on Pinterest yesterday-

 

How adorable is that?! I shook my first at the heavens, saying, "WHY!? Why did I have to find this SO CLOSE TO VALENTINE'S DAY? And AFTER I wrote all of my lesson plans for the week! AND the week of my first observation!"

Then I stopped and looked over at my mascot for student teaching...

That's right, it's Gumby.

I have a printed picture of Gumby next to my desk at school. Next to it, I wrote the words, "Be FLEXIBLE! ...and cheerful!" And this has basically become my mantra over the last three weeks. Children are unpredictable. Schools are unpredictable. And life is unpredictable. So when the unpredictable happens, I remind myself, "I'm flexible!"

Basically, Gumby is going to be my mascot for the rest of my career. Or maybe I can switch it up to Elastigirl, to suit my Disney obsession a bit better.

So after viewing Gumby, I said, forget it. I can rewrite the lesson plans, no problem. We can squish the lesson on self-editing into one day instead of two. We can put final publishing off by one day for a fun Valentine's Day activity. Of course, it'd have to be the day before Valentine's Day (because Friday we actually have a field trip) and that's the day of my observation... but that's okay too. Plus, I'm a huge fan of incorporating things that the kids can actually handle and manipulate. The fact that it is candy and the kids get excited to eat it doesn't hurt either... so maybe it'd actually be better for my observation rather than boring old peer editing (which is what I originally had scheduled that day.)

I felt it might be unfair to the students to switch their schedule up on them suddenly, so I took a vote.

"Look, ya'll, I'm gonna be honest- I found this really cute thing on Pinterest last night that I think you might find fun," I told them. And then I showed them all the picture. I explained how this would change our original writing plans for the week. Then they voted. The Pinterest Valentines idea won unamimously.

So here I am tonight, editing this week's lesson plans to fit the activity while simultaneously writing lesson plans for the next week. Oh, and blogging, because the idea was too cute to ignore. I wish I typed lesson plans as quickly as I typed up this blog post. Wah.