A Present, and Purple Cows!

A present!  Look at what one of my super crafty little 2nd grade girlies made for me this weekend...

 

And here's the inside...

I love it!  It's probably 18 inches high and 16 wide so it will fit lots of folders and papers... perfect for the "over flow" that doesn't fit in my normal teacher bag!

This is the same sweetie who pained this portrait of me that I shared with you earlier in the year:

Love it!

Last... Purple Cows!

Have you heard of my "Snazzy Snacks"?  I've been doing them for about 6 years now.  Once a month, we make a snack in class.  Parents sign up at Open House night to provide the ingredients and when their turn rolls around, I send home a shopping list for them and they return everything we need!

Then we write the recipe in our best handwriting...

Then we make the snack and... enjoy it!

Here is a pic of our "Purple Cows" from yesterday...  It's vanilla ice cream and grape juice!

Want to learn more about Snazzy Snacks?  You can check out the page on my website and even download the recipes, handwriting sheets (for some of them), and other Snazzy Snack goodies!

Ok!  That's it for today.  Tomorrow is our county "Young Author's" celebration.  Each school has their 2nd-5th graders write stories and the students with the best stories get to travel to our ISD to meet an author and illustrator and spend the day in workshops with them.  

I am the coordinator for my school so I'll be spending the day with 11 kiddos from my building who wrote stories about a girl with a strawberry touch- everything she eats turns to strawberries (this is from the sweetie who made my bag for me!), a story about a crazy little brother, one where a student and I travel to the time of the dinosaurs, non-fiction about predators, a broken arm, hockey game, and one where a girl discovers she is actually the daughter of a Greek goddess, among other wonderful stories.  We're going to see the Michigan author Rhonda Gowler Greene who wrote this hilarious book:

I'm super excited!

Congrats again, Patty, and happy Tuesday to all!

Snowman Cookies & Quicksand

Ok, fellow Michiganders... where is all of our snow?!  We had a Snazzy Snack this week- Snowman Cookies!  But it just felt weird making them when there isn't a flake to be seen!

Check out the cute pictures of our snack!  We frosted three Nilla Wafers and then added the details.  One of those is the one I made as a sample... bet you can't guess which one!

If you don't know about Snazzy Snacks, you can learn more on my class website and I have some great freebies for it there too!  We love making them each month!

We're also getting ready for science fair next week.  Last year we played with Oobleck after learning about matter and I wanted to do it again this year but had to sort of re-purpose it... so we made "quicksand" instead.  We actually started out just trying to answer the question of whether quicksand acted more like a solid or a liquid and our project evolved, though the smart questioning of my sweeties, into trying to find out the best way to escape from quicksand!

We learned that when we made our animals struggle, they only sunk deeper and we couldn't pull them out... but if we left them alone, we could pull them out much easier.  So, we, Southwestern Michigan children and teacher, are now super prepared should we ever find ourselves in quicksand peril!

One of my sweeties even came up with the name for our project... "The TRICKsand" because he said it's tricky to know which state of matter it is and it's tricky to get out of!

I'm facing a busy, busy weekend... we have a wedding rehearsal tonight and showtime tomorrow and Super Bowl fun at my parents' house on Sunday.  We are starting a new RTI-modeled intervention program next week between all the K, 1, and 2 teachers in my building... I'm super excited, but in need of some desperate prep last minute organization for it.  So, I'm going to try and sneak into school for a few hours on Sunday- you know, in between laundry, grocery shopping, and making food for the Super Bowl party... wish me luck!