Are you wearing underwear?

I have a little culprit at school who has accidents in his pants (#2!) and then removes his dirty drawers and leaves them in our bathroom on the floor. The first two times this happened, I didn't find the underwear until the end of the day and the children were all on their way out the door. Today, however, there was still an hour of school left when I made the stinky discovery. So...I pulled each boy into the hallway (in front of the cameras!) individually and asked them "Did you have an accident?" Each on of them said no - some vehemnetly, some confusedly. Then I asked "Are you wearing underwear today?" and had them turn down the edge of their waistband to show me the top part of their undies. Well, as luck would have it, TWO of my little guys were going commando today - and both insisted that they had been that way all day.

So even after all that, I am STILL no closer to finding the mystery pooper! I gave a big talk about how everyone has accidents and they can come to me and let me know and I will send them home or get them clothes etc. I honestly have no suspects in mind, because all of the boys I did suspect were wearing drawers when I checked lol! Aside from having a bathroom monitor to check after each boy uses the restroom, which I'm sure I would forget to keep up with, what else can I do? Oh, and it occurs to me that I was a bit sexist and should have checked the girls too, but I assumed it had to be a boy because it was boy's underwear. I am thinking of writing a note to parents to let them know what is happening so they can do a daily undie check of their own!


My students are also suffering from excessivechatitis - you know, that disease that makes it impossible for them to stay quiet for even two minutes! Seriously, we had our heads down, waiting for everyone to quiet down so we could begin inside recess, and I still had kiddos talking - about the silliest stuff! I've gotten to the point where I am writing notes to parents, and I never write notes to parents! I'm sure the inside recess is not helping, but instead of snow we're getting rain, so it looks like we'll be trapped inside quite a bit in the next few weeks. So far all of my usual tricks are ineffective, so until I hit upon a new idea I just keep praying for patience - deep breaths and looks skyward are becoming commonplace - one of these days a kiddo is going to ask why I keep looking at the ceiling!


Would you like to see a picture of my beautiful bulletin board? So would I! Unfortunately, my end of the hallway has become the graveyard for all those things that no one wants in their room, but for some reason we can't just get rid of. I took a picture of the pile of debris just so you'd feel sorry for me:

See that door on  the far side of the pile? That's where our new addition is - you know, the one that was supposed to be finished in October, December, maybe by Spring break! I am hopeful that when the addition is finished all of this stuff will find a home and I can finally display work outside my door again. In the meantime I have started encroaching on other teacher's space - my theory being, if you're not using it, you're losing it! My next door neighbor still has apples from September up - I wonder if she'd notice if I took them down and used that space??


Here is a mini display I made using the snowmen I bought after Christmas at Walmart (best time to buy snowman stuff, it was all 75% off!). It's 4 classrooms down from me, on the little space of wall above the recycling bins. I had each student write a story about building a snowman and the cut it out using our "fancy" scissors. It's cute and I loved their stories, but I wish our paper was more uniform - I have a very small ocd tendency that is irked by these mismatched papers! Of course, it's also irked by the smudges and wrinkles too, so unless I ironed every paper I still wouldn't be happy (come on, you know you're tempted to break out an iron from time to time too!).

Well, on to more pleasant things: my giveaway is still running until Sunday night so you still have time to enter to win one of 3 fabulous prizes! Click here to go to the giveaway!

I have been working on some more Groundhog Day things and I found this great clipart from Graphics by Ruth and Chantelle and it's free! Her TOU are great too - you can freely share anything made with her clipart - you just can't sell it! So yay for more freebies for you! She's got a lot of different clipart available, but so far I have only used her groundhogs. Here is a Roll & Cover game I made with it - there are addition and subtraction boards.
Groundhog Day Roll and Cover

Well that's it for tonight - I will leave you with a traditional Irish teacher blessing:

May the road rise up to meet you. 
May the wind always be at your back.
  May the sun shine warm upon your face, 
and rains fall soft upon your fields. 
And until we meet again, 
May your students keep their undies on!