What I'm Loving Wednesday

Happy Wednesday, friends! I have not participated in WILW since August 3rd!! Holy mama. I need to get back on it.

I'm loving that I'm lucky enough to have a class of 12 as a first-year teacher. They definitely feel like 30 sometimes though!

I'm loving the space unit we started yesterday! I really haven't done any full-on units yet - just tiny mini-units on September 11th or Labor Day or Grandparents' Day. But after seeing a few other teachers' space unit ideas, I thought that would be a good first unit! I never really liked science as a kid, and I don't want my class to feel that way. I'm trying to make this unit as hands-on as I can! Today we did a lab which helped us understand what causes day and night. We made models of the earth with foam balls and unsharpened pencils and then shined a light on the ball, which represented the sun! The kids really liked this a lot and it was a pretty inexpensive activity.

Tomorrow we study the Sun!

I'm loving that my first Scholastic book order came today!!!

Even only having 12 kids, our class bought $150 worth of books! Although I have to confess that my mom ordered some books for my cousin's birthday... haha! But because of our amazing total, I got a ton of free books!!!

I had $10 to spend in both SeeSaw and Lucky catalogs, and then I got free book packs from both also!! This made me sooooooo happy, because I love books! And the kids were excited about my free books too since they know that they'll be able to read them as soon as I categorize them! Too many exclamation points!!

I'm loving my bff Nicole who also helped out my class by buying the Hunger Games trilogy! They were a great price and they came with a Mockingjay pin! Now we have to get together so I can give her the books. :) Also I am loving this picture of us from New Year's 2009!!

I'm loving this idea that I adapted from a someone's classroom pictures blog post! I don't remember who it was, but if it was you, please tell me. :) My students ask me ALL DAY LONG when it is time for snack or lunch or going home - at which point I tell them how sad I am that they are so excited to leave me, haha. So I bought the dollar clocks from Target, stood on a stool, and tried not to break my limbs as I threw these up on the wall. God bless my hot glue gun!!! The first graders told me that it still doesn't help them since they can't read a regular clock....................... oh wells. Hopefully they'll catch on.......

I'm loving the education honor society I'm a member of - Kappa Delta Pi. As we speak, I am participating in a webinar about getting kids excited about reading and writing! However, I plugged in my headphones and nothing is happening, so I'm not loving that so much. I also got my New Teacher Advocate magazine in the mail from them today!

I'm loving that my kids get excited about morning meeting. I truly have no idea how to really do a morning meeting, but we do our best and they really look forward to it after morning work and routines are taken care of. They especially love when I play Start This Day With a Song from Jack Hartmann's Hip Hop Alphabop 2 cd.

Okay, I need to figure out why my headphones don't work!! What are you loving today?