Snow Day

Snow Days are WAY more fun when you have heat and electricity.

The power went out at 12:30 am
and hasn't come back on yet.

Our house is 45 degrees right now.

I forgot how cold it gets without heat.
And how boring it is without electricity.
The combination of the two made for a strange and rather long day.

Luckily, my parents' power came back on tonight,
so I'm nice and warm (and on-line) at their house.

Hopefully tomorrow's snow day will be warmer! :)

Teacher Talk- Management

I'm linking up today with Abby's Teacher Talk Thursday.
Today is all about management.

I don't consider myself an expert in this area at all,
but I can tell you what I do in my classroom. :)

I have a chart in my room that looks like this:

Each student has 5 red Velcro squares next to their name.
The 5 squares represent tickets that they will receive at the end of the week.
If they misbehave, they have to remove one of their squares
from the board. At the end of the week, I pass out their tickets.

They can buy all sorts of things with their tickets.
Pens, Lifesavers, plastic animals, stickers,
passes for no homework, sit by a friend, hot chocolate,
sit at the teacher's desk for a day and much more.

If they lose all of their tickets in one week, they have to write
a note home to their parents. This rarely happens.

My first year I tried passing out tickets when I saw
good behavior, but I had a hard time with it.
I don't know- it just didn't work for me.
And, you have to do what works for you.
That's probably one of the best pieces of advice that
I have received. Make your management plan yours.
This one works for me. It's simple, which I love.

I also have a marble jar in my classroom for whole class behavior.
When they fill it up we vote on what reward they would like.
I love planning their rewards! But I'll save that for another post.

In other exciting news...
I have a teacher blog!

School Day Love

I started it a little bit ago, but wanted to wait until
I had a few posts up to tell you about it.

And since those of you who aren't teachers are probably
a bit tired of reading (or ignoring) my teacher posts,
I can move them over there.
(Although, I'll probably still post some here too!)

I hope you'll come follow along!

This Past, Past Weekend

This past weekend, I did pretty much nothing.

I ate pizza.
I watched two chick flicks.
I graded papers.
I cleaned our closet.
I went to church.
Pretty much nothing exciting.
And I loved it.
But it doesn't leave too much to blog about.

So, I'll go back a weekend.
Because it was much more exciting.

On Saturday night, we surprised this lovely lady with a birthday party!
It was well planned and she jumped just a bit when we shouted SURPRISE at her!

We ate cake, played Scategories and went bowling.
I had a picture of bowling, but it didn't really turn out.
So you'll have to trust me- we went bowling.

Here are all the girls from the party (minus Al who came later!)

Hope you had a great birthday EMILY!

On Sunday, we celebrated another birthday- my Grandpa's!

He had some help blowing out the candles.

And isn't this just the sweetest picture?

This weekend will bring more birthday celebrations as the
little boy in the picture above will be turning FIVE!