A Day in First Grade...

Thankfully it is FINALLY Friday evening and the end of a very wEirD day! I am a first grade teacher, but not what you might think of when "first" grade comes to your mind. I have some eXtremely bright students! For example, with a couple of the boys in my classroom I was doing mini lessons on adding/subtracting fractions and introudicing negative numbers. Another group I was showing them how to solve some basic multiplication/division problems. The fun part, they were all actually getting it. Of course, our curriculum doesn't have any of that for first grade but we were using an awesome website http://www.freerice.com/ If you haven't ever checked it out, I highly recommend it. It's great for adults too! They have different subjects you can choose from and for every right answer you get they donate 10 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program to help end hunger. The kids LOVE it and get so excited to see how much rice they are donating.

Several of my students (and me) have had a SEVERE case of the sniffles lately. I'm not for sure if we are just spreading it around (even though germ-x is CONSTANTLY being used) or if it has just been allergies...either way it has been very annoying. Well later in the afternoon as I was reading a story aloud to the class, I kept hearing a couple of them continually "sniff" (up their snot). So finally I asked one of them to get a kleenex so I could stop hearing her sniff. As I watched her "blow" her nose I realized she had no idea how to actually "blow" her nose. So after earlier teaching all of these higher-level math problems I decided it was time now to do a mini-lesson on "how to properly blow your nose." I know, I'm sure it sounds disgusting, but in my opinion it was no more disgusting than continually hearing the "sniffing".

Now let me just to tell you, I LOVE my class to death! My students are absolutely hilarious and keep me laughing nearly all day long! They are all very well-behaved for the most part =). They fully obide by my cRazY desk organization rules suggestions (of their own desk). I'm talkin about I even made them color code the bottom of their journals in rainbow order so they'll know exactly which order I want them to keep them in and I do frequent "desk checks" throughout the DAY to make sure everything stays in perfect order. As much as I love my class, it has been hard the last several weeks to fully get attached to all of them. You see, there is 23 students in my class. Our state standard for class ratio of K-4th grade is 1 teacher to 22 students, so I have 1 extra student...in fact all 5 first grade teachers have had 1 extra student since the first week of school. So unfortunately today during our planning period all 5 of us had to make a few dreaded phone calls. I had to call two parents to let them know their child would no longer be in my class, and would be moved to our new first grade class. Let me just tell you, they were not easy to make! On Monday, the new teacher will introduce herself to the grade level and by Wednesday two of my sweet lil students will no longer be apart of our class.

Needless to say I'm glad it's FINALLY Friday so I can get away from the school stress for a couple of days. Although it's scheduled to rain all weekend, I have a fun and hopefully relaxing weekend planned for us. Brayden has two birthday parties to attend, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. He's getting such a lil social calendar now! I have a few decorating/craft ideas that I am wanting to at least start complete, plus a midterm and assignment due by Sunday night. Also, I'm looking forward to watching a lil college football (well actually only Oklahoma State.) After they had such an IMPRESSIVE and exciting win over Gerogia last week it makes me wish I still lived in Stillwater to enjoy all the fun festivities. Of course, I also hope to get in a lil bit of blog reading too. =)