Valentine's Day.... learning?

We had a Valentine's Day party today. Students were WOUND up. How were the students in your classroom? My teaching partner, Janice, said that they accomplished everything on the lesson plan today. What?! Really?! Because my students were wound up and cray-ZEE early in the day. We did do some character building lessons. Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. That must have been what they've heard. I had some planning in place for Valentine's Day. We were going to play the Valentine's Day Bingo game that I purchased from "Valentine's Day Literacy & Math: Oh, Lovely Learning!" by Linda Nelson, but it was too crazy. Time just disappeared. I guess because we spent a lot of time talking about respect and how to treat our school. One of my kiddos has started destroying property in our room, and taking things from others. I don't know what to do about it. I have talked about our Five Classroom Rules, what they mean, how they need to be part of a school family, etc. So I determined that we needed to do something festive and all about Valentine's Day. I made a quick pattern for some Valentine Fish that we used to make in preschool. After we made the fish, we brainstormed descriptions about our fish. We worked together on the first three words: My (a "popcorn" or high frequency word) fish (we spelled that together, they did a great job remembering what two letters we put together to make the sh! sound) is (another "popcorn" word).... then the students filled in their describing word. They had to "kid-write" it, sound it out phonetically. I had some students write their word on the white board for us.

Our Valentine Fish bulletin board

My fish is kofl (colorful).

My fish is sile (silly). 

I don't know if anyone thinks these are great or not, but I do. I loved them. I feel good about my students developing ability to sound out words. I feel good about that fact that they tried and weren't intimidated! Woo-hoo! 

Now, I do want my teacher friends to comment... what do you do when your students destroy property? How do you handle this? Also, how do you handle stealing? (A side note... the camera thing DOES work at Kindergarten level! I found this out because the substitute used it!). 

Valentine's Day with my loves.... I had a meeting after school and my children were doing chores at home. I finally got here and we ordered pizza. That was about all there was. I sat down to bang out this blog and have been dozing off repeatedly since. I am too tired to spend "quality time" with my children. *sigh*