My future's so bright, I gotta wear shades!

Y'all! I finally found the dollar section over at Wal-Mart! Ohmgeee! I had heard of this fabled place, but it truly exists! I got the cutest stuff for the Classroom of My Dreams. Speaking of the Classroom of My Dreams, yesterday Mrs. Happy threw me a teacher shower. It was the BEST party I have ever had in my almost 41 years! The kids were supposed to keep it a secret, but they were so excited they let a few hints drop. I was joking around and asked if Santa was coming to the school. One of my students said it was more exciting than that! That's right, she said a party for ME was more exciting than Santa! (Just realized I'm using a lot of exclamations. Hope y'all will forgive me.) They had me leave the room and when I came back they all yelled surprise! They ate ice cream sundaes while I walked around and hugged every one of those precious little people. Then I got to open presents! Some of the kids had brought in school supplies to get me started. One of the moms made me customized labels for my supplies and centers and they are so stinkin cute! Mrs. Happy got me a very generous gift card to Kohl's (our favorite place to shop) to buy teacher clothes. The gifts all came with notes from parents about how they appreciated what I had done for their children. And, as if all that wasn't enough, the kids stood in a circle and said something nice about me. The fifth child around the circle said "I love you because you're so nice" and then a lot of the other kids said the same thing. I managed not to cry. UNTIL one of the girls said she was sorry she wasn't able to get me a present and I said to all of the kids "you don't have to worry if you didn't get me a present. YOU were my present." Then I boohooed.

A couple of the moms came and one of them said she had emailed a friend of hers who is a principal to see if she would hire me. Can you believe it! It was such a great feeling to know that I had touched all of those lives.

Which is great because last week I made a whole bunch of 6 year olds cry. We did this really cool Christmas M&M place value activityhttp://www.teacherspayteachers/Product/Christmas-MM-Fun-A-Place-Value-and-Graphing-Activity. I made a really big deal about how we had to follow the rules in order to play and that at the end we would get to eat M&M's. (Which I thought would be enough incentive to get everyone to follow the rules.) We talked about and practiced the rules for about 5 minutes. There were only three rules. If you didn't follow the rules, you were out of the game and you had to sit on the carpet and not get M&M's. During the course of the "game" I had to send about 6 kids to the carpet. That's approximately 1/3 of my class sitting on the carpet crying because they didn't get M&M's. It was a very interesting experience. I hated seeing those kids cry. But I had set down the rules and they didn't follow them. when I started teaching them in the semester I did not consistently follow through with consequences, and I think I had a lot more behavior problems than I needed to.

Anyway. Now that I'm wrapping up student teaching I'm not sure what to do with this space. It looks like I will be subbing for a while. I hope I will have my own display room for all my cool stuff I mean classroom and my own group of children to love next school year. I will be thinking over winter break about how I could use this space to give back to the blogging community which has given so much to me. I don't really have cool ideas to share. And I'm not funny like some folks (Kristin). But I would like to contribute somehow.