I thought that since I’m already up that I’d link up with [DoodleBugs] for her 5 for Friday linky.

Here are my 5 randoms from this week!

One occurrence from this week is first and foremost in my mind right now…

A little background first… 2 Teachers who transferred from other districts have put in their 2 weeks notice.  I don’t know all of the details on their choices to leave the district, but I would venture to guess that it’s because DISD has a lot more “extra” stuff to do than their previous districts.  So, yesterday my principal called me into her office.

I immediately knew why…

She proceeded to tell me that she was 99% sure that she would be moving me to the 4th grade Math position that is opening.  WHY OH WHY???  I have no experience in 4th grade and no experience teaching a tested grade/subject.  I finally feel like me feet are underneath me since I am in 1st grade again.  I don’t want that feeling of being in the dark feeling again.  I could understand if my classroom was being disbursed due to lack of enrollment, but it’s not.  Another teacher would come in to take my current class.  Math is also the tested subject in 4th grade in Texas, can you say mega pressure?

This morning I typed up a long e-mail explaining why I did not think that moving me was good for the students or my personal life.  Fingers and toes are crossed that I can stay where I am.

On the brighter side (literally), I purchased my first set of Scentos this week!

I have been using them during Daily 5 with my small groups, and the LOVE them.  I’m all about adding in those little extra things to help my kiddos get excited about learning.

For most of this 6 weeks in Science we have been learning about classifying matter.  It’s been a slew of classifying by color, shape, size, texture, weight, etc etc etc.  This week we focus on viscosity and fluidity of liquids.  I was a little worried about using these terms with my kiddos, but they did great because of the hands-on experiments.

The kiddos got to test fluidity and viscosity of several liquids using aluminum foil as a makeshift ramp.  They timed home long it took for the liquid to travel from the top of the foil to the bottom.  I modeled this whole process one day, then let the kiddos do it themselves the following day.

We were going to wrap up fluidity and viscosity with a fun experiment today of making a rainbow in a jar – but maybe we can move this to Monday!  I did it last year with my kiddos and they were in awe!  You can find the directions for that experiment [here].

This next “random” actually happened last week, but who’s checking?  I whipped up a [My Hispanic Heritage Book] to celebrate National Hispanic Heritage month!  The kids had a blast learning about important Hispanic leaders such as Sonia Sotomayor, Cesar Chavez, Ellen Ochoa, and more!  I think it is so important to show students of diverse backgrounds what people of similar backgrounds have accomplished.  It was definitely an inspiring week of Social Studies!

This week I created [My College Book] to celebrate college week at school.  Each day during Social Studies we have been learning about what college is, colleges across Texas, and the college around the country.  Today would have been “Dress Like Your Future Career” day, but the power outage says differently.

I love being able to share a bit about college with my first graders.  I know that when I was young I had no clue what college was.

That’s about it for this week.  Off to enjoy my unexpected 3-day weekend!  Happy Friday y’all!