Five for Fraturday!

This week has been one of the BEST weeks in our classroom this year.  There is something magical on our hallway and it just felt SO good.  I felt like I was finally back to the old me.  The me that I loved and the one that forgot about all of the other junk with teaching and just focused on her students! It felt amazing!  So, I've hopped on the Five for Friday train to share what happened in our classroom this week.  Unfortunately, the link is on vacation until January, but I wanted to keep it going on my blog anyway. I'll be posting more details about some of the activities later on this week for those of you who asked for more details on Instagram.

I absolutely love the community that I get the privilege to teach.  This year my little school had a float in the Christmas parade and I spent my Saturday evening serving hot chocolate to parents while we waited for the parade to begin.  The parade was magical and really kicked off the holiday spirit in all of use who were involved.  Our little float was designed by one of our first graders and the entire school pulled together to "pomp" the globe with thousands of tissue paper squares. 

We tidied up our study of mixtures and solutions with a fun day of cooking.  Students made different dishes to reflect their learning of mixtures and solutions.  We then wrote about how we would separate each mixture using different techniques.  When students took their quiz the following day, everyone got it!  So glad that I was able to get back to my roots and do the things I loved this week.  And Lola, thank you for starting this whole activity way back when!  It's still one of my favorites.

Yesterday we took a "field trip" in our building to read some of the student work hanging on the walls.  Our teachers create amazing displays, but too often, the work isn't read or noticed, just the amazing displays.  So, my group of kiddos and I set off to make sure that students were noticed.  We read each piece of work and left post-it notes about what we liked.  The kids loved it and we heard the kindergarteners loved it too.  Their favorite comment was, "Your writing has lots of swag!" and "Your writing is the bomb dot com."  Gotta love teaching 5th graders!

We ended our day yesterday with a little celebration time.  Sometimes you just have to throw the plans out of the window and remember that you teach kids - not adults.  My kids have worked so hard  over the last few weeks.  We took our Winter MAP this week and they grew by leaps and bounds.  Over 3/4 of the class met or exceeded their goals for Spring.  It was such a good feeling.  We did a last minute round up of ice cream and root beer and made floats.  While we were making them, they were making connections about solids, liquids, and gases, as well as mixtures and solutions.  I couldn't have asked for a better way to end our day.  By the way, you see that big smile on my kiddo there in blue...that was my goal this week - I needed to make him laugh and smile.  Think I accomplished that by Friday afternoon.  

We created a chant to help us line up on the playground each day.  That has been an area of struggle for my kids all year because some just don't pay attention and this teacher doesn't have a loud commanding voice they hear on the other side of the playground.  So, we took the song "Bottons Up" and wrote "Line 'Em Up."  I'll have video to share next week.  We ran out of time on Friday and my phone only had 2% battery left.  Ahh, technology!