Hooray for Friday and Linky Parties! It's Five for Friday time!

Five for Friday! Hooray! I love Five for Friday. And I am so grateful that I can post this week because my computer was at the doctor all week. Wow. I thought food was the love of my life, but it might be my computer. I survived, but barely. Ha ha. I'm sure that sounds funny, but it was rough! Yikes! My usual Saturday morning routine includes browsing the blogs I follow, so last weekend I had to go up to my classroom to browse. I have SO MUCH to do today to prepare for report cards and parent-teacher conferences, so my blog browsing will have to be short! Who else makes sure their room is sunnier and brighter and more inviting than usual for conference time? (As you know if you are reading this, it's not Friday anymore, I got my Five posted on Saturday...)

I'm so grateful that Doodlebugs hosts Five for Friday every week. Hop over, link up, read them, comment. Enjoy!

Here's my five:

1. Love from students. Today when students were packing up, one of my Spanish speaking students gave me a little paper triangle pouch, it looks a lot like a May Day basket. In the paper there were: 2 marbles, a Hershey's kiss, a tootsie pop, a little mechanical pencil and a calculator. I felt completely loved. :)

I have to confess... I was jealous of everything my blog buddies got for Valentine's Day. I didn't get much. Boo-hoo, poor me. But now, I feel fabulous, you all got nothin' on me! 

2. We are bucket fillers! I got the bulletin board up and I plan to make some heart and star die cuts this weekend. I think we will each think of one way we could fill someone's bucket and write it on our die cut and I will post them as well. During the last nine weeks I will put hearts or stars up with the childs' name on them when I "catch" them filling a bucket. I am tickled at how well the bulletin board turned out and how my kiddos are catching on to being bucket fillers.

3. Lunch with the teacher. Today was "eat with the teacher" day. Students who earned a reward ticket could have chosen an "eat with the teacher" ticket. One of my students who chose this doesn't speak English or Spanish. So I was not sure how I would converse with him. It was hard.  But I did find out that he plays soccer.  He was so excited to tell me. I loved talking to him about something non-school related. He also told me who his best friend is at school! I was thinking about taking that reward ticket out because I need my "sanity time" at lunch. But this lunch might have changed my mind again. I love learning about students!

4. Thursday we experienced uncharacteristically warm weather. I decided we should take advantage and go outside to read Junie B. Jones. But we were not in the shade and there was no breeze. In other words, it felt hot! So I checked the temperature on my phone.... 84 degrees at 12:00, noon, on a March day! Wow! The prediction was 74 and I thought that was warm! I tend to think that when kids can't concentrate or learn, I should "go with it." They were as restless as the day is long. So we tried to include the warm weather in our learning time.

It was 84 at noon and still 84 at 4. I checked again at 6. Yep, 84!

Heading back inside after a WARM read-aloud

Aren't they adorable? 

5. Assessments and report cards.Ugh. I've already read about how others are feeling about that.  It's time to be done with assessments, but I'm still assessing like crazy. It will consume a large portion of my week. I am going to say "that's okay" and try to be flexible. I can't wait to see how much my kiddos have grown and changed.  I am not looking forward to assessing. My room, however, is looking great. I am almost ready for conference time! Woo hoo! Here are our George Washington's that we finally got finished!

Please don't notice that when the teacher prepared the hats oh-so-quickly she made them upside down! Yikes! I got the craft off Pinterest of course. I'm trying to get better at giving credit where credit is due, so here's the pin: George Washington on Pinterest.