Spiders, Flags and Coffee

I stopped at Wally World after school tonight to pick up some tissue paper and cat food and end up buying a shirt. You know you have sunk to new depths (or leapt to new heights?!) when you buy a shirt because it matches one of your units! I've been working on a Colorful Spider unit for October and lo and behold there was a great Halloween shirt with colorful spiders and webs all over the arms! Plus it doesn't actually say Halloween, so I can wear it without fear of offending anyone!

Do you celebrate Halloween? We have some families that don't due to religious beliefs, so we try to avoid anything overtly Halloweenish and instead just go with spiders, nocturnal animals, and scarecrows etc. Thus my spider unit with some adorable clipart by From the Pond. The unit isn't quite finished yet - partly because I keep thinking of more things to add, but also because my poor laptop keeps deciding to turn itself off at random times and then not turn back on for hours. I have got to replace that soon!

Today was a good Monday - my kiddos were so excited to do our flag craft! They tried very hard to space out the red stripes perfectly. This was our first really challenging craftivity and I got new insight into my perfectionists, my Helpless Helens (& Henrys) and my ones who just can't retain more than one direction in their head at a time! Luckily I had a tutor in the room to help me and luckily it kind of counted as a math activity - after all it's an AB pattern and they had to count stripes, right?

Honestly though, it went better than I expected with 23 kiddos all trying to make a fairly complex craft (thank goodness 3 were absent lol!). We all managed to put the proper amount of red stripes on (some had more succes in spacing them than others) and put the blue field on - tomorrow morning we'll add the stars. And yes, we are indeed going to try to do all 50 starts in the proper pattern!

Once we do the stars we will try our hands at making quilt squares (mine are actually more rectangular - hopefully that works!). I spent 45 minutes after school punching out red, white and blue things for on the quilt! I also tried to buy marbles at Wally World so we could marble paint our quilt, but they didn't have any! I bought small bouncy balls instead - also hoping that those work lol! Tomorrow will be quite a day of experimentation!

We have to get all of that finished up in the morning because in the afternoon we will be performing our "Red, White and Blue" song! So excited! I am still awaiting word on whether I'll be allowed to share it - hopefully I can because I am so stinking proud of the work the kiddos have done - they absolutely love the song and beg to sing it all the time!

We also managed to have an almost-complete, almost- right work station rotation today! I realized that with 5 groups its just not reasonable to expect to get to every group every day when we only have an hour. So instead we'll do 3-4 rotations. We also don't have our laptops hooked up yet. I am praying for that work order to be fulfilled quickly because with 26 kiddos, work stations are noisy! At least once computer station is up and running I'll have 4 kiddos silent! I am also open to suggestions for help with the noise problem - as I walk around the room the chatter is all on task, but with 26 kids and three adults (me, plus two tutors) its bound to be noisy! Not to mention that my room is so large we echo - I know, I know, poor me with a big room!

So far this is a very long-winded post with no pictures! I promise to do better tomorrow - we should have many projects finished and I will share those, as well as some updated pictures of our (large) room!

In the meantime, here are a few pictures of my newest creation - coffee play dough! Our play dough center is extremely popular - the kids loved the playdough word family cards to help them stamp cvc words! I have had a container of coffee sitting around forever - I bought an very cheap brand just to get the tin, poured out the coffee into a bowl and forgot about it! I finally managed to get back around to it - partly because my husband got tired of moving that bowl of coffee around and threatened to throw it out lol!  This morning as I was smothering a yawn I was thinking about how to get the scent of coffee in my room to help wake me up - well this should do the trick! I adapted the recipe found here by basically doubling all of the ingredients:

 Look how much coffee I still have left! Any ideas on how to use the rest of it??

 I almost made a ying yang symbbol and then decided that was too much work lol.

 Stir it all up....

 Enlist some help when it start getting tough to mix!

And there's a big blob of play dough, ready for short i word family stamping tomorrow!

Have a good night everyone!