SUCCESS!

Today we successfully used our eggs for more than voting on a name or telling the lunch choice! The kids LOVE the eggs and using them. I have heard from several parents that their student has told them all about the eggs at home and how cool they are. And the best part is it was a math assessment so I can take the data and measure who understands and who does not understand and utilize that information.
I set the expectation for Monday that the eggs will be out when they get into class in the morning and that they are to go and make their lunch choice and return their eggs immediately. We'll see how that goes. I need to get them independent though so I'll keep working on it.
This was the last Friday of the month so today was a spirit day. We had assembly and the band played and we honored our students of the month. It was a tough choice again this month but we narrowed it down to a student that is always patient and respectful and never speaks out of turn. This student stays in their seat and raises their hand instead of getting up and finding me- which a serious problem in my class at this point. I was happy to give this award to this student and the smile on their face was golden when their name was called!

This coming month's moral focus virtue is Gratitude. I have a couple of lessons already planned to work on gratitude so I'm excited to get those going.

I had a long chat with RM today about how students are starting to be disrespectful and some ideas we can do to address this and end the problem. I was 100% all week and RM has been out of the room most of the time. This is how it is supposed to be with student teaching. She checks in on me at least every hour or half hour- but she wants me to be comfortable and independent and not able to just refer to her when something happens that I'm not sure about (because in reality she wouldn't be there when I have my own classroom). I certainly need to work on this skill though. 

We worked on our plant unit today. We observed some growth in many of the plants. There were a couple plants that had no obvious growth though. We only planted three days ago though so I'm not too alarmed. I did have one child very upset and cry that there was no growth though. I think overall there were five that had nothing to observe yet. Once the child realized her's wasn't the only one that had no growth she was ok. We talked about how plants (seeds) can be unpredictable and that we have to be patient. Of course, after school I pulled those five cups with zero growth and added more seeds- just to be safe! 

I am still working on getting them to specials on time. This is a huge struggle because we have to stack and pack and get everything done before we go to specials. Monday this will be my goal and we will start five minutes earlier- hopefully I'll be successful!