It's FRIDAY FRIDAY

The day started with some fun bonding with our kindergarten buddies. Being that we spent all week working on poetry, our 5th graders brought them poetry books to enjoy. It was the cutest thing EVER… I cannot even tell how adorable it was. While they finished reading I went into the classroom and set up our Crew activity for the day which was mind trap… Yup, we did it as a field hockey team last fall during our “team bonding” sessions… hopefully it works out for my 5th graders. When they came in for Crew it was SOOOO exciting to see all of the cool things Ms. Detmer had put out for them… Picture: 22 kids in a candy store and little to no super vision... It felt CRAZY… So I did like any good Stanley Intern and used a transition in a super super soft voice so they really had to listen “if you can hear me touch your nose. If you can hear me clap once…” You get the idea. They all stopped dead in their tracks like deer in headlights on I-70 late at night… I could see the same reaction on their face… This is going to be the COOLEST thing we’ve ever done… When Mr. A and I modeled the initiative the kids were literally chomping at the bit to get started… So we let them at it… It was wonderful to watch because they totally collaborated. This whole week’s worth of Crew has come to this moment… They called each other by name to clarify through all the confusion, they used “big, small, and medium” steps and bend down slowly etc; etc; I was so impressed with them. After we wrote in our journals about this experience the kids moved on to finishing up their color poems, which we had been working on all week. This is when I got a re-lesson in peer pressure and the need to be cool... In case you missed my awkward years, I wasn't exactly on the "inside" of life and found peer pressure to be a particularly difficult lesson. One boy in our class had done this awesome color poem and created it into the shape of an R for a wonderful visual affect in his poem, suddenly got jealous of all the kids using the computers to type up their poems and decided against Scott and my's advice to type his poem. Needless to say it didn't turn out the way it had started and I felt like he had let me down in some way because he was so desperate to be like his fellows and use a computer... Not realizing his poem stood out from the rest because of his shape... When all the kids finished we let them all share since there were so many wonderful descriptions of words that everyone needed to hear. The class definitely deserved some high praise. We followed up by putting all the poems in the halls for the other kids to see the cool poems.. Some were typed, some hand written, some had pictures, some were small, some were big... It was a wonderful display of their work. The transition into math went smoothly, I think their confidences were boosted because of their poems in the hall.. They knew they needed to perform well for that to happen again....