Hump Day came quickly this week!  I can't believe we're more than half-way over with this week...whew!  What happened in our class today?  Well......

Sideways
Do you ever feel like sometimes your life is just a little bit tilted?  Well, life actually was tilted in Room 106 today.  During one of my reading groups, I did a quick scan of the room and looked over to see one of my students with his head cocked completely to the side--like, perpendicular to the way it's supposed to be.  And then I looked past him and at the computer screen, and sure enough, the orientation was 90 degrees counter-clockwise!  Even after restarting the computer, it was still crooked, so we retired it for the day...

Books, books, books!
Some of what we've been reading:

Measurement...

...measurement...

...and more measurement!  (And I didn't even realize until today that I had picked up so many Steve Jenkins book at the library this weekend!  His illustrations are awesome and very real.  The kiddos loooovveeeedddd him!)

C'mon--how could a kid not love pictures like this?!?  This page is a giant squid eye--the actual size of one!

Another money book.  My kids know and love the bunnies (Max and Ruby), so this was a hit.

More money!  Was I the last one to realize that David Adler has written dozens and dozens of books??  I knew him mostly as an author of social studies texts/biographies, but he writes the whole she-bang!

  

Who could forget Little Bear?  We're still doing an author study on Else Holmelund Minarik, so this week, we are visiting Grandma and Grandpa Bear :)

Ah, Patricia Polacco...I love to squeeze her into lessons when I get a chance!  Her books are lengthy, so this one took us two days to finish, but Just in Time, Abraham Lincoln is a great--and real--collection of facts about Honest Abe and his contributions to the United States during the Civil War.

Speaking of Abe...
While we were reading Polacco's Just in Time, Abraham Lincoln, I took a couple of minutes to talk to the kiddos about the Civil War.  It's tricky to put something like the topic of war into first grade words, so I decided to tell them the story of the Civil War as real as I could, and most actually grasped the ideas of slavery, war, and a divided nation well!

And, of course--as always--a great conversation and six-year-old quotable emerged from it all :)
Student 1: "You mean there used to be slaves?"
Me: "Yes, a long time ago."
Student 2: "Yeah, like, [turns to his classmate] before we were born."
Student 1: "Wait, Ms. Weissberg, was this even before YOU were born?!?"
Me: "Quite some time before I was born."
Student 3: "Whew...then slaves were around a loooooong time ago."

Flattered, as always...




More quotables

- "It's like the north pole out here!"  (When walking outside for recess yesterday and a gust of wind blew a student's jacket open)

- "Don't take that off, Ms. Weissberg--it's bad luck!  You can't do that when you're married!"  (I took off a ring I was wearing during math today to measure it with an inch-tile so that we could compare measurements--which is what we're learning about--and apparently today was the first time in the year that I was hitched...how did I not know this?!?)

In closing news, I'm a little disappointed in Mother Nature this year.  I was hoping for a snow day or two (teachers have dreams, too!), but it looks like she's not planning on delivering any of the white stuff to northern Virginia.  (We were supposed to get snow today and it was just rain...)  I plan on wearing my pajamas inside out until it comes, though!

Even without snow,
Love from Room 106,
Allie