Teaching in the Net: Happy (Almost) Summer...Sunday Scoop 5/24/15

I'm joining up with Teaching Trio for the Sunday Scoop! I love the Sunday Scoop - I'm a routine kind of gal!

This past week was a bad week for me. It's why I didn't blog as much as I wanted to.

I had to put my cat, Jake, down. He had cancer in his liver and spleen, and there was nothing they could do for him. I knew he hadn't been quite himself lately, but to have to put him down was a complete shock. I am heartbroken. He was only 9 years old - not very old in cat years. I've had cats live to be 18 or older! I'm not quite ready to go into detail about it. I'm still in some shock and I'm still completely sad and heartbroken. I will post a tribute to him later, when I feel the time is right. In addition to having to make the horrible decision about Jake, my husband was out of town. I was all alone in having to make this decision. Plus there were other things going on, happy things, like our 8th grade graduation. It was a celebration of a job well done, but I found myself sorta sad about all that too. I was more emotional about it than usual, partly because of my sadness with Jake, but I've known all of these kids for so long. It was hard to see them graduate and move on to bigger and better things. Plus I was so proud of them. They all had their own learning/behavior/social challenges, and they worked so hard to overcome them. It's like being a proud mama of 12 kids!

Anyway, the rest of my week went fine! My literacy kids and I continued our end of the year countdown. I instagrammed earlier in the week about our flashlight reading day. We were supposed to go outside and read, but Wednesday was rainy and almost cold! So we had to improvise. The kids LOVED it though. I bought some of those cheap flashlights from Oriental Trading, handed them out with a (FREE!!) summer-y reading passage from ReadWorks, and voila! There was 100% reading, 100% focus, and 100% engagement by every single student. Maybe I should do flashlight reading more often! :)

In other news, I have to give a shout-out to one of my best friends and colleagues, Mrs. Janna Mathews! She had a "State Fair" with her 3rd graders on Thursday. They've been studying the regions of the United States all year, and she assigned each of her students a state on which to do a report/project. They created posters and presented them at the state fair. It was held in the auditorium, and the students were placed around the room at their "stations". She invited the parents to come in and use the school's popcorn machine to pop popcorn and hand out to people as they went around and viewed each station. She also had patriotic/state/US songs playing overhead, so it felt very stately! It was a great success! Everyone enjoyed learning about the states, and the students were overjoyed to share it a million times with all of the viewers!