My Truth Monday- Yes, I'm afraid of the dark!

Well, it's just in time for Halloween and Denise picked a set of creepy questions for My Truth Monday today!

I really am not a huge fan of Halloween, mostly because all of the scary movie previews that come on late at night!!  I am definitely afraid of the dark (well, of what could be waiting in the dark!) and I don't like seeing scary images right before bed!  I can't even watch Criminal Minds- even the background music gives me scary thoughts.  I also do not do haunted houses!  I remember going to one as a teenager and I'm pretty sure I left a permanent mark in my friend's dad's arm from holding on so tight!  So yes, I am a big wuss when it comes to scary things- I prefer nice TV shows and movies with hot guys or cute babies!

Be sure to link up with Denise over at Sunny Days in Second Grade!!  :)

My Truth Monday- a 12 Part Series

I am excited to link up with Denise from Sunny Days in Second Grade for her 'My Truth Monday' series!  She is going to post a new topic each Monday and everyone is invited to share their thoughts each week.

Today's topic is My Truth About Fitness!

I did Girls on the Run last year with the 3rd, 4th and 5th graders at our school and it was an amazing experience!!  I teach first grade, so it was really great to get to know some of the older girls, some of which were my former students!  We had a great time with the weekly lessons and had a lot of fun out on the track together.  We did the 5K together in December and that was an amazing experience as well!!

That's me on the left along with my awesome first grade team!!

I told myself that I was going to run/jog the whole 5K for my personal fitness goal, but once I got going, I found it was much more important to run with the girls at their pace, especially a few who were struggling.  It was really fun to motivate each other and set little mini-goals throughout the race.  Our school had a 3rd grader who was the very last participant to cross the finish line and I was in tears running with her!!  We were all in tears!  Her dad ran the last part with her and was encouraging her and motivating her and then a big group of teachers and other girls crossed the finish line together with her.  Everyone was cheering and clapping and it was a really moving experience!!


Thanks for listening to my story, be sure to share yours as well!!  I am really excited about this series (and a little nervous about what topics Denise will pick!)  Can't wait to learn more about you and everyone out there in blog-land!

If you want to link up, just click the pink button at the top of this post to go to Denise's original post.  Even if you don't have a blog, I would love to hear your 'truth'!  Just add it as a comment below this post!!

Five for Friday!

Hello Friends!!!  Are you as excited as I am that it's FRIDAY?!?!  Woo hoo!

I hope you had a good week this week!  The weather is finally cooling off down here in Texas and our 1:35 recess was actually bearable and enjoyable this week.  We also had a training day on Monday with an hour and a half lunch- which we enjoyed on the patio of a local restaurant!  I'm loving this cooler weather!!

Anyway, I'm glad to be linking up with Doodlebugs Teaching again for Five for Friday...here are my random pictures from this week, and I really do mean random!!  :)

I love switching out my calendar at home each month (even though I'm always a few days late)!  I love this calendar from Dana Heacock and have used hers ever since college!  A family I nannied for had it in their kitchen and I just loved it, so now I get a new one every year!

This will give you a little clue about how busy everyone at our school is this year!!  In August, I made new alphabet cards to hang in my room and just now had the time to print and laminate them!!!  With trainings, meetings, huge class sizes and everything else thrown on a teacher's plate- I just haven't had two seconds to get these printed!  I still have my boring one up that came with our reading curriculum, we'll see how long it takes me to get these stapled up there!!

On Wednesday night we went to see ZZ Top!  They were so awesome!!  This is actually the second time we've seen them and they are just so energetic, it's crazy!  I hope I can move like that when I'm their age!! 

If you don't know those two faces on the screen- you are missing out!!!  It's Annie and Moby from Brain Pop Jr.!!!  I seriously love those videos and so do my students.  There are videos on a huge variety of topics- bullying...Pablo Picasso...washing your hands...colors...tally marks- anything!  There's also a version for older grades that is just called Brain Pop.  Luckily, our district pays for the subscription, but I really do use the videos on a weekly basis!

I plugged in my very first Scentsy warmer today and wow, my classroom smelled Ah-maz-ing!!  I used Autumn Sunset today and I also have Cinnamon Bear to try next!!  I loooove cinnamon and anything that smells like fall!!  And now it can smell like fall all year round!!  Yes!

I do hope everyone had a great week and has an even better weekend!  We don't get Monday off, so I don't have a three day weekend like a lot of you do!!  So sad...oh well!  And speaking of sad, I'm about to watch the Finn episode of Glee on my DVR.  I need to go get the tissues ready!!

Don't forget to link up with Kacey to share your pictures!!

Don't move the rug!!!

This will be short and sweet, but I just had to share this random story from today!!

Yesterday (Monday) was a student holiday.  Teachers got the joy of spending the day in various helpful trainings...yeah, no comment about that.  Anyway, since the school was fairly empty, our amazing, wonderful, superb, I really love him custodian did a deep clean of a lot of our rooms.  I didn't know he was going to, but he shampooed our carpet and it is bright, shiny and as good as new today!

I noticed that it looked extra clean when I walked in this morning and noticed that my chair and a few other things had been moved around, which was totally fine with me.  I didn't think anything of it, moved everything back and headed off to get the kids for breakfast.

We eat breakfast in the classroom every morning and I have morning work written on the easel for my students to do once they finish their breakfast.  As they were bringing their journals and pencils to the carpet, I noticed a lot of them looking very confused and not really sure what to do.  Were they confused by the clean carpet?  Was there a bug I didn't see?  I had no idea.  As this kept happening, it finally clicked!  Our wonderful custodian had inadvertently flip flopped the carpet when he brought it back from shampooing it.  The red side used to be farthest from the easel, with the purple side right in front of the easel, but now it was completely the opposite!  The kids just could not figure out where to sit, since their color square wasn't where they left it on Friday!  It cracked me up inside to see how set they were on looking for "their square" to sit in. 

It is pretty amazing all of the things I ask them to remember in terms of procedures for the classroom (in addition to all the learning we do as well!  :)  )  They have a spot on the carpet, a line order, a lunch table order, a center team and even a color group!  Whew!

Once we got past the confusing mystery of the flip flopped rug- we ended up having a great day!  Hopefully our morning work tomorrow won't be as confusing!!

Sharing an AMAZING resource for teachers plus a shape freebie from me!

Hello Friends!

Whew!  It has been a long week!  We finally hired a 6th teacher for our grade level and Wednesday was the first day for the new class to start.  It's been crazy trying to get everything ready for the new class/classroom and the new teacher, but it has been so nice to be down to a normal class size in my own room!!  I went from 28 kiddos to 21, so that was a huge drop!  My room sounds all echo-y (probably not a real word) now and we finally have room to walk around the desks without bumping into each other!  It was a "fun" 6 weeks with a ridiculously long line of first graders everywhere we went but I am happy to say that we all fit on the carpet now!!  With all the craziness of moving desks to new rooms and rearranging my classroom, I forgot to take any pictures of our week.  :(  We had a lot of fun with shapes, though, and even went on a Shape Walk to find 2D shapes around the school.  I'm super bummed that I don't have pictures of how excited my kids were when we went out looking for shapes!!  They were adorable with their clip boards and had a blast on our walk.  I'll be happy share the shape walk page I made, along with a shape sheet we glued into our math journals, just click here to download it!

Anyway, the real reason I'm blogging today is to tell you about an AMAZING site/person who is helping teachers across the globe!  The wonderfully generous Laura Candler started a Donors Choose giving page called Caring Classrooms.  (If you haven't heard of Donors Choose, it is a website where teachers can create and submit projects in order to ask for donations for their classrooms.  It is an amazing way to bring technology, literacy, resources and so much more to classrooms that might not otherwise have access to those items.  Definitely worth checking out to donate to other teachers and even submit a project of your own!)

Click on the picture to visit Caring Classrooms!!

So back to Caring Classrooms- Laura and her colleague Francie run the giving page and keep 10 projects up at a time.  That's where donors can read about the currently posted projects and donate to any or all as they see fit!  Even a dollar donation is ok- every little bit helps!!  They also have a Facebook page where they do a fun feature called Fund-Day Sunday.  Teachers with projects on Donors Choose can link up to the Fund-Day Sunday post each week.   They can explain their project after they donate to at least one current project.  Once a spot opens up, Laura and Francie choose another one from that post to go up in it's place.  It is an amazing network of teachers helping other teachers and the page has currently raised over $14,000 for classroom resources!!

I hope you will click on over to visit Caring Classrooms and see the awesome generosity for yourself!!  And if you've got a project of your own, why don't you try linking up with this week's Fund-Day Sunday?!  Can't hurt to try, right?

Caring Classrooms giving page
Caring Classrooms on Facebook
Caring Classrooms on Laura's Corkboard Connections blog