Whew! I Think I Can See Some Light...and Spring Break is Getting Nearer!!!

I haven't posted recently because I have just been swamped! I think I told you that our other kindergarten teacher retired, my principal hired someone from the admin building. We were all so happy!!! She has a teaching degree but had never taught. She came in and had 2 days to try to get the room in order. She took the kids on Wednesday and then on Wednesday evening...she resigned.  ):   ):   ):   That is for that poor group of kinders that just keeps getting split up between classes because most of the time we can't find a sub. After that incident my principal has been teaching the class except on days that she had principal duties that can't be ignored. She thinks she may have another person, but after the last experience....

The main reason I have been swamped is Boxtops. Our PTA was in charge of boxtops the last two years. At the beginning of the year, our PTA sort of just went bye bye, not sure what happened. I asked the principal if I could take over collecting the boxtops. So when I got online to register as coordinator, our school account was empty. No boxtops sent in ever. I talked to the principal about it and ton Valentines Day blue the PTA president dropped off a BIG bag of boxtops that were already on collection pages. As you can imagine a lot of them were out of date. Most of them were two years old (names and teachers were on the collection sheets). So I started the task of tearing and cutting them off. The next deadline was March 1 so I was under the gun. I seriously must have spent at least 30 hours messing with those things, but on Thursday, I put all $432 worth of boxtops in the mail and threw probably another $200 worth of out of date ones in  the trash. Since I am doing this by myself, I decided to make it as easy as I could. We have a big plastic jar in the office that the kids drop their boxtops. They write their name on the back and we draw 5 or 6 names every week for a small prize (pencil, fancy eraser, etc....). I got the idea from Delaney's school and I like how it kind of helps motivate the kids to bring in the boxtops. I told my kids if they saw a box in trash with one on it, bring it to school and I would cut it off for them...well I did say as long as the box didn't have food on it. ;P

Despite having four kinders in my room everyday, we are still learning. We are just finishing up with fractions. I had to squeeze them in before our final benchmark test that was on Feb 20. Yes you read right our final benchmark on Feb 20. You can probably guess why they moved the date up...state testing. grrrrr  Anyway, we did some fun stuff with fractions. We did marshmallow fractions using the colored marshmallows, of course the kids liked that since they got to eat them when we finished.. We also did name fractions. I found it here.

I wanted to do the Fraction Pillars from Cara Carroll and I probably will still do it, but while we were working one day I decided to try "Fraction Cream Cones".   The kids talked so much about ice cream while they were making them, I decided to go ahead and have them write about ice cream.

They all wanted to add sprinkles, I was going to get something for them to glue on, but they drew them on before I got a chance. ;P.

I also introduced compound words last week. We used my Funny Fish pack from TPT

I showed the kids a few examples and then I gave them a page with four fish on it. they were pumped up and ready to go. the next day I passed them back out and had them pick out their favorite.They put that one on a 81/2 x 11 piece of paper that will go into a  class book.

Here I thought we were on the downhill slide to Spring and Old Man Winter is rearing his ugly head one more time this weekend. As much I as I like being out of school, I really hope we don't have another snow day. We, teachers are making up 6 days at the end of the year which means my last day is June 10. I think I may use a sick day at least for the 10th if we can.

Have a restful weekend!