My favorite place in the world...

Only 8 more school days until Spring Break... WOOHOOO! You can definitely tell that my kiddos are ready to get out: tons of tattling, talking, and tears over pencils. PENCILS! And they're MY PENCILS that I bought, and we have literally about 1,000 pencils in our room. Too bad, so sad, I am not playing Detective Smith to fingerprint and ID the owner of the pencil in question.

To kick off our weather study in reading this week, I went to the library right after school on Friday. As in  if-I-don't-go-right-now-and-do-not-go-home-first-I-will-definitely-forget-and-have-to-make-up-my-own-weather-books-Monday-morning-at-8:39. I picked up about 20 picture books and nonfiction emergent readers to help us answer our weather questions. After toting my gigantically heavy bag over to the carpet full of books, I set the stage for our reading lesson:

"Boys and girls, this weekend I went to one of my FAVORITE PLACES!"
Immediate 1st grader response: "KARAOKE?"
"Uhm, no, the library."
"Oh."

After a full day of pulling teeth for responses and moving spots on the carpet and making bar graphs of our class pet wish list {can you tell I REALLLLY want to get a class pet?}, I gave up and gave in to the madness. We watched 3 BrainPOP Jr. videos today {thank God I signed up for a free trial last night} and then moseyed on over to our class Twitter.

Around St. Patrick's day, another classroom asked us questions about our leprechaun projects we made. I was thrilled to actually have someone talk to us/respond to us on Twitter, so I made 2 students respond immediately. I was bummed out when they didn't answer for another day or two, but it's totally understandable now because they are a class in IRELAND! I couldn't believe it when they sent us another message on Friday:

I jumped upon the chance to try and expand our worldview, so we downloaded Google Earth and zoomed from our school to their school in Ireland. {With only a few incidents of being "lost" in the Atlantic Ocean when my Smartboard did not respond to me. And yes, of course my firsties screamed and pretended they were swimming/saw sharks.} Then we watched their leprechaun video and some precious ones SWORE they saw the leprechaun running in the pitch black video. I can't wait to continue the conversation, my kids can't wait to pretend they are swimming again.

And finally, the ONLY thing that got me through today with only a mild migraine was the gallon of kisses theat were abandoned at the bottom of my bag from my lovely KDP gift... THANKS AGAIN!

Brave kisses before they were devoured