More Week 5: snow, Snow, SNOW!!!!

Tuesday: Still sick... but today was pretty good!! I tried to zoom through everything in the morning so that we had time to finish the 100 day activities my CT wanted to fit in, but it just didn't happen. I was super excited to read My Many Colored Days to the kids, so when a few of them were supposed to leave for extra help, they didn't want to go! Their teacher said they could stay for the book :-) My CT said it was a good sign that I got them so excited for a book! After reading it, I made a worksheet for them to do that said "Today I feel (insert color) because..." and they got to fill it in and draw a picture. I really like how most of them turned out, and it was nice to see how they were all feeling. They got to throw their snowballs, then we did a really ...exciting... (read: plain) Word Work lesson. They all seem to get the point though :-)
After lunch was a read aloud and my first full math lesson! I now understand my CT's frustration with it... For problem #1, I went through each instruction specifically, twice... and they still didn't get it. So for problem #2, I went through the instructions, had them repeat the instructions, AND gave picture clues for each step on the board. Guess what? ...They STILL missed some things! So then I decided that some of them were just not going to get it, so I needed to keep going for the ones that did, and just catch the other ones up bit by bit... otherwise, that math lesson would have taken the entire day!
During special time, my CT was able to leave since she lives farther away from the school, and they didn't want her to get stuck in the snowstorm. The lovely substitute who came in asked if I would just like to finish the day, so I decided to go for it :-) I rushed through a lot, though, because I really wanted to get through all the activities my CT left. We spent probably 15 minutes finishing the writing activity from before special time, then made our "friends" for Thursday's narrative assignment, and spent the last 10 minutes writing about what we had learned in 100 days in first grade. My CT was super excited about the last activity, so I practically begged them to do their best work... unfortunately, the results were not quite as spectacular as I'd hoped they would be...
In that last hour, however, I found true love. It's http://www.vickiblackwell.com/timer.html . A classroom timer that my CT shows on the TV so all the kids can see their time remaining. AND... it RINGS!! It was SO wonderful -- I could say 3 minutes and actually follow through on that amount of time, to make sure we had time to work on all the assignments! And they could see how fast they needed to work. Thank goodness for that :-D

Overall, though, it was a fun experience! I'm excited I could actually write about it today, since dance classes were canceled, too! And... SNOW DAY TOMORROW!!!!!

Now I have time to get my voice back after today ;-) Hope everyone enjoys their day off, and happy birthday to one of the CT Kids!!! <3:-) [[It's a birthday hat... I think!]]