Help my class!

School starts in 11 days. 11 days!! That is craziness. We're on a balanced calendar, so we have 9 weeks of school, then 2 weeks of vacation. It's a pretty nice schedule, but still a little crazy to go back to school in July.

I've been busy getting my classroom ready for the new year (pics to come soon) and seeing what I still need to get. One big thing is non-fiction texts. I have a HUGE classroom library of fiction books, but very few non-fiction books and even fewer that are on the kids' reading levels. So I've made a new Donor's Choose project- and I need your help!

Visit my project page  and give whatever you can! $1, $20, every penny helps. I'd love to get this project funded before school starts!

thanks for your help!

Dr. Seuss Week: day 1

This past week was Dr. Seuss week at school. I made sure to take my fancy-dancy camera so I would get some good pictures. I sure did! The kids had so much fun every day of the week. And I had a blast doing all the "fun" activities (and sneaking some good learning in with it!)

Monday's theme was "Cat in the Hat". I had all my kids wear a red shirt because I wanted to do this:

It was so cute! It's a little hard to see but they each have a "Thing __" sign numbered from 1-17. So precious! As you can tell, I was the Cat in the Hat. We had so much fun and the kids LOVED it! I think they also liked getting all the attention from the other students in the school :)

That afternoon we had an all-school assembly and luckily the weather was beautiful:

A local group called "Ride for Reading" showed up on bikes to deliver books for all the students!

So many books! My kids got to each pick a book which was very special for them.

Stay tuned for day 2: Green Eggs and Ham!

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

The week leading up to March 2 was "Read Me" week at school. We celebrated by having some guest readers come to our class:Our librarian is the greatest! She just asked us when people could come and then arranged all the volunteer readers. Of course, some teachers ask friends and family to come read, but since this was the same week I got engaged, my mind was not really focused on Read Me week! Sorry kids. We still had some great guests come (even though I didn't know them) and it was a good experience for the kids to have someone other than me read to them.

Then, on Friday March 2 it was time to celebrate Dr. Seuss' birthday! We had been reading Dr. Seuss books all week so the kids were super excited. I had big plans to make some super cute snacks a la Pinterest, but then my silly boyfriend had to go and propose! So once again, my mind was elsewhere. I don't think the kids minded having store-bought snacks. Here they are enjoying their "Thing" punch (bc it was blue), one fish two fish goldfish and Lorax cupcakes:

They're also wearing their Dr. Seuss hats we made with -at rhyming words. I was a little worried that this activity was over their heads (ha! no pun intended) but they did great! Most kids just did the same words I had brainstormed, but some added words on their own. Love their little minds! Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!!

p.s. our celebration was supposed to be at the end of the day, but we had really bad storms all day in our area that day so kids were leaving left and right. Finally at about 1:30 (our day ends at 3:45) I decided to have the party with the remaining 11 kids. Good thing I did because not too long after we had to "duck and cover" because of tornadoes in the area!