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.

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Getting back into the swing of things.

Oh my goodness, it's been a long time since I've updated the blog. Since the last update, we experienced our super beautiful and magical Disney vacation. I will eventually go back and update the blog with our day-by-day experiences and photos and all that fun stuff.

In the meantime, though, a big reason of why I haven't been around to update is because first of all, my laptop decided it did not want to charge anymore and so it was rendered useless until I found the problem and purchased a new charger. It literally just came in yesterday so this is my full day back with a completely functional laptop.

The second reason is because I AM OFFICIALLY STUDENT TEACHING! And man, I feel like I have no time at all. I'm always either at some sort of meeting or writing lesson plans or working or trying to sleep for once... and I'm glad Tristan and I took our big romantic vacation right before starting all this madness because we maybe talk fifteen minutes a day now, with a few texts in between. We went from seeing each other every day to once or twice a week. I miss him terribly.

But! Life at the school is great and my kiddos keep me entertained. I am loving being back in the first grade will all of my little ones (even the crazy little ones!) Being in the school every day is exhausting but I can't think of any other way I'd rather spend my days.

After today, I have eleven weeks to go. This week has gone by so quickly! And things have been madness with my health. After we got home from our trip, I got this terrible red eye. It just got worse and the kids started asking me what was wrong with it. I've been to the eye doctor twice and it still isn't any better. I started antibiotics yesterday that will hopefully clear it up. I really miss wearing my contacts.

There's so much I want to write about, both about the trip and about my adventures as a almost-teacher. I want to tell you all about our class gerbil, and the 100th day of school and I even want to write about the book fair where I picked up some goodies. I want to... but it'll have to wait until tonight or tomorrow. Because unfortunately I just got out of class for the day and now I'm headed straight to work. Life is busy!

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