May 06, 2005

I love this week. Why - you say? Because it's National Teacher Appreciation week. All week there have been yummy things in the teachers lounge and today I got a plant and two difference Starbucks gift cards. One of my students gave me a gift today and said, "because it's Teacher Day." All day the kids kept saying things like "happy birthday and happy aniversary" because they knew it was a holiday but they couldn't remember which one.
Oh boy where have I been? Let me recap the last few weeks for ya:

1. I've been to a Kindergarten Conference. Yes, kindergarten teachers from all over Washington met in Seattle for a conference. I was a little skeptical, as I like to think I don't fit the puppet-toting, embroidered-seasonal-vest-wearing stereotypical image of a Kindergarten teacher, but it turned out that there were a wide range of people there from the stereotypical to the grumpy (please pray that your child does not get one of these very GRUMPY kindergarten teachers) including many that were my age. I stayed with Sarah, Paul and princess Kelina on Alki and they took me to Spuds, my favorite restaraunt anywhere, and we stayed up watching a girl movie. It was pretty great.

2. My chicks hatched. The whole class was "yellin' with fun-ness" as one of my children so aptly described. I don't really remember if I blogged about my chicks. Three weeks ago we started some eggs in a portable incubator in my classroom. This is probably against many fire codes. Well, to make a long story short three weeks later they kind of finally hatched. I say kind of because none of the chicks that I put in my incubator actually hatched, so we pulled a switcheroo on the kids and replaced them with some that one of my cohorts put in her incubator at home at the same time. It was a great success, they never noticed. We had five Aracona chickens. We may have ducks next week. I love the miracle of life. I think that my kids respect life much more now than they did before. It turned into an entire school project because of course every class had to come see them. I will try to post pictures.

3. I had to say goodbye to the one student in my class who was the absolute hardest to say goodbye to. We went through some rough times in her life together this year and today she had to move away.