Full moons and Valentines

Hey all!
I have to say thank you to all of my fellow teacher blog buds and followers who wrote about this week being especially hard. It was SO hard!! I have a great class and I was finding myself saying things I never thought I would and sounding like my mother which was scarrrrrry! I blame the full moon. I do. I felt like I had a class full of little werewolves on the verge of turning! They were just crazy, busy, talking, roaming, yelling, fighting, pushing, crying, arguing, tattling and generally grumpy and moody. What happened to my sweet little smiley bugs that loved hugs and laughing and centers and listening to a story?? If you find them, can you please send them back to room 852? I'll gladly exchange them for the impostors who took their place.

Even in the midst of the craziness, I relied on my belief that you catch more flies with honey, so I found myself really rewarding the good behaviors that I saw and it did help. for about a second. We even had a team visit from administration who sweetly asked us to review the cafeteria rules because second grade seemed to be giving them a bigger headache than the other grades. oh joy. That at least helped me to know it just wasn't my group of nuggets being unusually unruly. I could also see it in the halls when more than one class was taking time to regroup with their heads down (hey - desperate times...).

I'm not expecting this week to be much better. We have Monday off for MLK then I have a team leader release day Wednesday, Thursday is an early release day and then it's a teacher planning day on Friday. We have chosen this week to try to squeeze in our fluency assessments since it's not a great week to do much of anything else of substance. Oh, and did I mention that the following week I'll be out Wednesday-Friday to attend FETC?  I have trusted subs that I can leave real plans with so I know my kids are in good hands. I'm actually going to leave some Valentine's Day things for them to get a start on. Can you believe that? I JUST (I mean just...as in yesterday. again, don't judge) finished de-Christmas-izing my house.

It might be a teeny bit early, but I wanted to share one of the sweetest gifts I ever received for Valentine's Day. It might be nice to pass the idea along to your own personal chid's room mom as a gift idea. I guess you could switch this up for any reason, even from a group of adults, like a retirement gift or teacher appreciation gift or bosses day gift (if you like your bosses...) Inside each of these bottles are handwritten love notes from each of my students. They are rolled up individually and secured with little rubber bands. The outside of the bottles are written on with a paint pen. Sweet, right?

I keep these out all year just because I love them. And I love pink things. And hearts. And I have such fond memories of the class that gave it to me and the wonderful mom who organized it. Have you ever had the kind of family where you wish the parents would have like 10 kids so you could teach them all? That was this mom. This was one of her beautiful girls who was in this class. Just delicious inside and out.

Have a fantastic Sunday friends. I hope you get to un-set the alarm for tomorrow morning! I'm having a problem getting threaded comments to work which is totally bumming me out! I'm working on it (thanks to my blogging idol Kristen aka Ladybug's Teacher Files). I feel like it will be so cool to comment right back to everyone. Fingers crossed I get it workin!