Dog names

As the story so often goes, I was able to hang some really neat new things in my room the past couple of days, but forgot to take pictures--I even remembered my camera!  So, look for those to come :)

Two quotes from today to make you smile (well, they made me smile at least!) . . .
We recently began our math unit on Geometry, so I changed some things in the classroom to deal with shapes.  One of the things I changed was the signs over each table; they used to be different colored stars (I had a "red" table, a "yellow" table, a "blue table," etc.) but I changed them to different--and differently colored--shapes.  So now each table has a color and a shape to remember, like the orange squares or the yellow hexagons.  (Yup, my kiddos know hexagons!  And rhombuses and trapezoids, too!)  When the kids walked in this morning and saw the change on the ceiling, this was a snip-it of a conversation that I caught and jotted down:

Student 1: "Whoa, look at the shapes!"
Student 2: "How do you think she [me] did it so fast this morning?!?"  (I think the students think I take the bus and get to school around the same time as them, but little do they know I've already been at school for more than an hour by the time of their arrival . . . )
Student 1: "I bet she did it at night . . . "
Student 2: "Yeah, probably right before she went to sleep!"

Up until now, the kiddos have only guessed that I live in a hotel, but now I think it's safe to say that some think I live at school in our classroom!


To preface this second story, I feel like I tell stories about my reading groups a lot, and I promise we do things other than reading groups in first grade--though reading is the big first grade goal.  It's just that during this time of day, I am sitting with 4-6 students at a horseshoe-shaped table, so it is a more intimate setting, where I am privy to much of their first grade dialogue.  I digress . . . One of my reading groups read a book today about a girl named Rosie and her dog, Fred.  After reading our story, I was working on some writing with these students, and asked them to write three sentences for me: one about the beginning, one about the middle, and one about the end of the story.  I looked over at one of my students, who, mid-way through his second sentence, had already written the name "Max" twice--there was no Max, human or canine, in the story.  So I said, "Who's Max?"  His reply: "Ahhh!  I mean Fred!!!  I just got confused because most people call their dogs Max!"

Do you have a dog named Max?  I think I've only ever met one dog in my life named Max!

Love from Room 106,
Allie