The Roller Rides of March

Oh hi, guys! Sorry for the brief hiatus; I've been busy laminating everything I can possibly get my hands on.

Admit it, this is the most beautiful thermal laminator you've ever seen.

It's been a busy few weeks. We've had a few illnesses, hopefully the last for a long while; poor Agent J. was out for almost a week. Agent V. drew this totally terrifying get well dinosaur for him, and I made a copy hoping it would scare the germs away.

The Agents have been doing a lot of writing in a lot of different ways. Sometimes they respond to things they've read. Others they're writing their own stories. Their favorite form of writing so far, however, has been the silly sentence puzzles. My grandmother sent me these several months ago, but it wasn't until recently their full potential was realized. The Agents had a blast connecting nouns, verbs, adjectives, and articles together to make silly sentences like: "The ball crawled over the monkey" and "The firefighter jumped on the carrot and ate a fish". They were so amused by their creations they didn't moan a bit about writing them into their journals.

Speaking of writing, Agent V. has been working really hard on spelling words and putting his own sentences together. This is his most perfect one yet, although it didn't quite follow the instructions of the activity, and he was so proud of it he asked me to post it to the blog. Good job, Agent V.!

We've also been working hard in Science, learning about the human body. The Agents' favorite part of this unit so far has been the Circulatory System Game. We took a few of the big red wooden beads from our pattern bead kit for 'blood' and 'circulated' them around, adding one more every time we made several successful rounds until we got to four beads total. They ask if we can play it pretty much every other day, and would pass the beads around forever if I let them.

Look at them go.

We haven't spent all our time working, though! We've had outside days an inside days and roller cart days...

Egg salad and potato soup days...

Dental hygiene days...

And Green Eggs and "Ham" days. Both the visit from Erica from Just For Kids Pediatric Dentistry and the foray into green food were hosted by Little Treasures Child Care, so a big thank you to them! The Agents had a blast. The green food, a tribute to Dr. Seuss on his birthday, was an especially nice touch. The kids ate their green eggs and green "ham" and listened to a recording and animation of the book Green Eggs and Ham about twelve million times (much to the dismay of our 6th grade visitor, honorary Agent T.).

 

Last Friday we had another special visitor, future Agent A. Agent A. has been on the blog a couple times, most notably on our field trip to Pumpkin Land, but on Friday she spent the whole day with us - and even came in uniform! It was so great having her. Agent M. was super stoked to have her kid sister in the class, and Agents V and J were pretty excited as well. Agent A. is in preschool, but she got down to business and showed us how ready she'll be for Kindergarten next year. She also gave me a chance to try out a binder system I might use in place of/conjunction with the more traditional workboxes, and it went even better than I'd hoped. Thanks a bunch, Agent A.!

During Agent A.'s visit, we made corn on the cob. This was a request of Agent J., and a bit of a challenge being that it's only the first few days of Spring and we're in Maine. Luckily I found some frozen ears at the grocery just as I began to despair, and the Agents had a lot of fun with it after we turned it into a sort of game in which the Agents rolled the corn onto the spoon and lowered it into the water.

Agent M. made even more of a challenge out of it by attempting to roll the corn onto the spoon without using her hands.

I hope your March has been as fantastic as ours has been so far! It's hard to believe this is the last week of the month. Last week was the first day of Spring, and I've been taking down all our winter decorations with much heartache. Winter is my favorite season. I have to say, though, it'll be nice to have a break from the cold and grey. Anyway, I'm off to put a bit of spring in the classroom. Stay tuned for fabulousness!

God bless,
Mia

On 100 Days, Valentines, and Fancy Tables

 

On February 13, the Agents and I celebrated our 100th day of school. We added our 100th sticker to our 100 Days chart...

 

Took a picture in front of our 100 Numbers Wall...

 

Made crowns with 100 stickers on them, glasses out of the number 100, and necklaces using 100 beads...

 

Made a 100 Day snack bag using ten pieces of ten kinds of snacks...

 

Built a wall using 100 red plastic cups...

 

And made 'If I Were 100' posters, aging ourselves 100 years.

 

We also celebrated Valentine's day early, due to the possibility of a snowstorm on the 14th. We had our friends from LTCC Preschool come downstairs, and everyone passed out Valentines.

 

 

Even I got some!

 

 

 Agent J. and Miss Candace outdid themselves, giving the other Agents super nifty pencils with carefully selected animals on them. Agents M & V were very excited!

 

 

On February 15, the Agents and I took our show on the road and performed at Limington SDA Church. I'll be posting the video from this performance later on this week, so stay tuned!

 

 

It was also at this performance we debuted our very first 'commercial', made from an interview with the kids during National School Choice Week. Everyone loved it, and now you can love it too.

 

 

February 17 to February 22 was Winter Break, which - for those readers in unlucky Ohio - is a vacation week apparently unique to New England. My mother flew up for a visit on the 17th, and we spent the entire week undergoing a project that seemed easy at first but quickly grew into an unprecedented behemoth:  building new tables for the classroom. I prefer tables to desks, especially in small multigrade classrooms like my own, because they help conserve space and foster a sense of community among the students. The purple table we have been using for the past few months belongs to LTCC, and because they'll need it for their new preschool room when it gets up and running, I mentioned to my mother I'd need to find a new table somewhere.  I don't remember how it happened, but somewhere along the line she decided she would come build me one instead.

 

 

You'd think the easiest part would be buying the wood, but it was actually very tense. There were no blueprints for the tables we built. My mother simple IMed me a picture of a table and asked if I liked it, and when I said I loved it, she said 'okay' and that was that. When she got to Maine we printed off a picture of the table, went around measuring desks and chairs kids in chairs and the tables in the cafeteria, and researched the standard desk heights for kids from grades K-3 and 4-8. Then she drew some lines and numbers on the whiteboard and on the picture of the table and off we went. When we got to Home Depot more computing was needed to make sure we didn't buy a billion dollars worth of the wrong size wood. Watching my mother crunch numbers was like watching a race against time in an action thriller. After that, everything was smooth sailing.

 

Haha, just kidding. After that everything was barely controlled chaos.

 



 

But by Monday morning, by the grace of God and the sheer genius of my mother, we had these gorgeous tables! Just look at them in all their freshly stained glory!

The Agents were super excited, which made the whole week of work worth it tenfold. Since then we've had the opportunity to try the tables out with the older Afterschool Care kids and the LTCC Preschoolers, and I'm pleased to say the tables were a success with both!

 

Meanwhile, in the stairwell, my mother found time to begin our next project...

 

 

Thanks, mom, for being so fantastic and coming to my rescue with hammer and jigsaw!

 

Tune in next week to read about our Dr. Seuss and hygiene escapades!

 

God bless,

Mia