Five for Friday

It's Friday and I couldn't wait to link up and post my Five for Friday.  Except I had to wait since I spent 5 hours of my evening on the road. Doodle Bugs is having a linky party, Five for Friday. I love these. Hop on over and read some more of them. And link up.

Five random things from the day or from the week.

1. Red (or "the read head" or any various assortment of other nicknames) is in Kansas this weekend and she took a little piece of my heart with her. I will be lonely and missing a chunk of my heart until Sunday afternoon when we meet up and she is with me again. These weekends also make for a lot of drive time~ boo. Or boo hoo. Tonight I drove 2 1/2 hours one way and then drove back home again.

2. I have been working on the organization thing. One thing is that I want to get my centers organized and ready before the day they need to be up and running. I have some wonderful resources. I printed almost 100 pages on card stock one night this week.  Thursday I spent over an hour laminating. I have lots of cutting to do this weekend. 

3. Our friend Tyler moved to another school district at Christmastime. As my teen would say... "sadface." We miss him dearly, he was a valuable part of our school family.  I put together some papers of his that were on display when he moved, along with his report card, and thought.... "we should send him a letter...." so if a student wanted to write a letter instead of doing morning seat work they could. Several students wrote to him. I included one of my favorite ones. 

Dear Tyler, I miss you, my best friend ever. From Ismael.

4. I don't know what to do with compliments and flattery. This week I have received a lot of compliments which makes me happy and helps me to feel like I am doing a good job. But really, I don't know what to do with it, it makes me want to cry. In all honesty I have to give some of credit back to the kids. I have a fantastic class. On Wednesday when the counselor visited she complimented me twice. The one that got me was when she said she never would have guessed that I was a first year teacher, that she thought I had been teaching for years. Yesterday, I had to leave early, so another teacher came down and covered my class. She told my kids what an awesome teacher they have and she asked me how long it took to teach them our five classroom rules (they nailed it when they went through our rules for her).  Thank you whole brain teaching and Mrs. Hamilton, my cooperating teacher during student teaching.

5. On Fridays we usually have an informal phonics lesson. We didn't get our test taken yesterday so today we took the test and then we played "Around the World" with sight words, or popcorn words. I was pleasantly surprised at how many words my students could read.