Party Time!

As I said on Facebook earlier today - I've never had a wedding, but I imagine that this Halloween party was pretty close. By that I mean that I planned forever for it, I hardly ate anything, and it went by in a flash!!

Today was my first ever Halloween classroom party. The only time I've been in the classroom for Halloween was 3 years ago during a clinical in college, so it was a whole new world for me today! I wasn't sure how much room parent help I'd have, so I planned everything but the craft.

I ended up having two parent helpers and one grandparent helper (two of which I wasn't expecting) and so everything was incredibly under control.

We did four stations. The first one was my room parent's craft that she thought of and brought everything in for (yay!). The kids decorated oranges like pumpkins with frosting. They also put a green pipe cleaner in the top to be the stem. They loved it! And tomorrow when the frosting has dried, we will have a delicious treat!

The second station was pumpkin playdough! My kids LOVE playdough, as you may remember from the first day of school, so I thought they'd like this. I got the idea for the pumpkin version from this post at Frogs, Bees, and Under the Seas. The kids loved that it smelled like pumpkin. And they were SO EXCITED when I said that they could take home their playdough balls.

The third station was the Tricks and Treats game I got from Mrs. Bainbridge. This was another hit! One of my room parents ran this game so I did not see firsthand how well it worked but when I came around to tell everyone to switch stations, everyone leaving that station was beaming. I think it was the candy. :)

And last, we did the Jumping Like a Spider activity from The Wise and Witty Teacher. We weren't able to get through all of it (because the other stations went so fast thanks to my awesome helpers) but I think it was good for the kids to get up and jump around for a while! I found out that I have some future Olympic long jumpers in my room!!

And let me tell you about the food situation. My one room mom had been talking to me and she said that she was going to bring mostly healthy food and one treat. I said, "Great!" It was surprising to me when, this morning, I had THREE students bring in cupcakes. Three!!!!!! Way too many cupcakes, people!!! Luckily, my room mom brought tons of good food to make up for it (I hope). I just wanted to eat the whole table!!

And how about that steamy punch??? That was definitely a highlight. Yay room moms!!

One last picture - we have a set of three siblings at school, and one's in my room. They all brought super cute and creative cupcakes. Here is my student's cupcakes!

I wish I could show you all the cute costumes! I had a few Batwomen, police officers, and butterflies. I also had an AWESOME Cleopatra, complete with heavy makeup! Loved it.

So I survived my first party! And I'll definitely do party stations like that again in the future. :) How was your Halloween?

What I'm Loving Wednesday

I have been way too tired to blog lately! Hopefully I can come back with this edition of WILW.

I'm loving that my class does funny stuff that makes me laugh all day long. They are a handful, I can't lie about that, and I need to beef up my classroom management, but they make every day manageable with the funny things they say and do,

I'm loving something specific that happened yesterday. We have a milk break in the morning every day, and so I have my daily chocolate milk (which really gets me through the morning sometimes) at 9:30. Yesterday I didn't finish my carton and apparently I set it on the corner of my desk. At the end of the day, some of the kids told me that there was milk in our Rubbermaid milk carton holder. I was like, "Who didn't finish their milk??? Milk break was like 5 hours ago!!" Then they said it was mine. ....................... Oops. But one of my very sweet girls ran the carton holder to the bathroom, scrubbed it out, and dried it for me! That really made my day because I didn't even ask her!

I'm loving that I spent time after school with my next-door neighbor classroom friend!! We had a lot of fun!

I'm loving the mummy activity I borrowed from Jenn at Finally in First. We read Where's My Mummy?, which the kids LOVED. They were beside themselves that the baby mummy was afraid of a mouse and not all of the other scary things in the forest.

Afterwards, we did the same activity that Jenn posted about. I didn't have manila paper, but I went to a going-out-of-business sale yesterday and got some textured linen colored paper that worked great!

I'm loving the traceable letters that I borrowed from the upper grade teachers!! It wasn't really that fun to cut out the letters but they look so nice!

I'm loving that my family went down to Purdue this weekend to see my brother and to watch the homecoming football game against U of I! I love my broski and it was a fun weekend.

I'm loving the pumpkin life cycle activity that I read about at Fabulous in First. Instead of making the little pocket, we made life cycle necklaces. Even my boys LOVED them. The printable life cycle was really cute.

I'm loving my ESL class this semester. My teacher is awesome! Last week, we learned about TPR in an amazing way. My teacher speaks Japanese, so she taught us a Japanese lesson using TPR so we could see how it felt to be language learners and to see if the strategy really worked. Also, my teacher teaches a 1/2 split class right now, just like me!

What I'm not loving is that I have homework for my class...... and report cards are due this week..... and conferences are next week.... and I haven't decided 100% on a costume for Halloween for my class!!!!

Oh wells. I'll make it work. :)