I Am Still Alive!

In the midst of another week of my teaching adventure, I am having a great time! It is stressful and a lot of work, but the kids are so much fun! This week I had them create tribe habitats for the 5 tribes of Utah. They were divided into groups and each had a tribe to research. They brought everything they needed to make habitats showing the food, clothing, shelter, and way of life of their tribe. This is them in the process of creating:






























The finished products!




















It was fun, just listening to them work together! They were so cute! The made pretty cool little habitats. It is fun also to see what their creative little minds could do.

I also had some of the students that were looking for a "job" to do, rearrange my collection of books that were given to me by a retiring teacher. Here are the pictures of them! I couldn't resist how they sorted them out.... and then look at how they spelled the categories out on the boxes.... :)

5 Weeks Down, 4 More to Go!

So, I can't believe I have made it through 5 weeks of teaching! Only 4 more weeks until I go off track! Wahoo! What a journey so far! This week I was sooo frustrated on Monday because I felt like the kids weren't turning things in and all the papers just kept piling up and so on, but then I talked to my mentor (another 4th grade teacher) and she told me that if kids don't finish their work or bring their homework back, they have to stay in and do it at recess in her class. What a NOVEL idea! :) So, I started posting up all the work each student was missing and making them stay in and it has worked so well! I am getting a lot more work turned in, because they really don't like to stay in for recess! Who knew....

As far as the work piling up to correct, I started sending it home for parents to do (that said they could do it) and it worked too. It has made it a lot easier for me to grade the really important things instead of spending my time on all the "little" things! To all those parents out there who help out teachers...THANK YOU! It really does make a difference!

I also had a few parent volunteers come and help out this week in the classroom. On Monday, we did salt dough maps of Utah, because that is what we have been talking about in Social Studies and a mom came and helped with that. Also, today I had a mom come in to help give spelling tests. It was so nice to have that time to some other things. I also have a mom that has planned out who is going to help with all of the parties and who is going to come and work with the kids on certain days of the week and so on. It is great to have people willing to do things like that!

On the down side of things, I gave out a math test on a unit I have been teaching and only about 7 kids passed with 80 percent and above! :( Real wake up call to me! So, now I have to go back and reteach a few things next week and test them again. The joys of teaching! :)

Anyway, I took pictures of the kids with their salt dough maps when they were finished. They turned out so cute! The librarian is letting us display them in the library. They were excited to do that! Here are the pictures:

Can't tell who the class clown is, can you? :) And then there are the sweet girls!

Baby Lexie Pictures

This is the first day home for baby Lexie. Big sis loves her new baby sister!

Such a cute picture of both my nieces and nephew!