Motivation

It is "holiday recess" (to be politically correct)...

and since we are in the midst of a blizzard I sat down to work on my lesson planning for the following week.

I opened my plan book to find a small piece of notebook paper that I quickly stuck in there while packing my stuff to leave for vacation.

The paper has a note on it that one of my students wrote and put on my desk before she left on our last day of school. It reads:

"Dear Miss Rosen,

I hope you have a Awesome Christmas and a good vacation!!!!

I'll see you when we get back (which will be in 2011) but I'll miss you!

Sincerely,

Student"

This little letter made me realize that although I desperately need this week long break from job-I really do love my hectic, challenging, exhausting, time consuming, wonderful job. And I am actually looking forward to seeing my students next week and listening to their stories from Christmas and vacation!

Also, while reading this note I am even more pleased that she used correct friendly letter format, spelled 'which' and 'sincerely' correctly, and has two paragraphs! We do need to work on using 'an' before words starting with vowels

! I definitely look at everything through a teacher lens now!

-Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing

A Christmas Present

Student: Ms. Sixth, when's your birthday?
Ms. Sixth: Not until May why?
Student: Oh man, you really need a new pencil sharpener, so I was going to get you one, but I don't think I can wait that long.

Ms. Sixth: So if I lived back in the day with the Egyptians I would only have about 8 more years left before I died!
Student: OMG you're only 22?!
Ms. Sixth: (in my head... gosh these 12 year olds are too fast with their math fact fluency)

I have a "store" where my students can spend the "dollars" they earn in class at the end of the week...
Student: I only need two more dollars then I can get my dad's Christmas present!
*I'm glad I can provide families their 2010 Christmas presents hahaha. This was one of the cutest things ever I must say.

-Sixth

Heading into the Holiday Season

We are quickly approaching the last week of school before Christmas vacation and it.is.crazy.

I have found myself totally not in the Christmas spirit. I am exhausted from work, I have no time to shop, and I am really dreading spending the small amount of money I've saved up thus far. I do not like malls to begin with and all those people and lines make me cringe, and even the Secret Santa swap we did at work turned out to not be very secret for me!

However, being a 4th grade teacher, I totally want to give my students that 'holiday feeling' that I can still remember from elementary school. I am trying my hardest to spread the holiday cheer during the school day, because to them, this really is the most wonderful time of the year (besides summer, of course)

I can say that my students will be giving their families gifts, much greater than the ones I am giving my family....I definitely put more thought, effort, time and money into their gifts than my own. I haven't decided if that is a good or bad thing.

However, myself and my other 4th grade counterpart deserve "Teacher of the Season" awards for what we were able to pull off! Our students are each memorizing a part of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas and we are presenting our poem to all the other grades on Thursday. That isn't even the cool part...we had each kid illustrate their part of the poem, then we scanned their pictures and their lines into iMovie, AND recorded their voices reading their lines. We put all the illustrations and voices together into an amazing video complete with an opening, ending credits, and background music from the Nutcracker AND to top it all off- we are burning a DVD of it for every student to take home to their families. Ta-da! An amazing gift, if I do say so myself!

In addition to that- I took (and printed out) all their pictures. Then I got them unfinished frames that we are going to decorate in school with lots of colorful fun crafty items and they will be able to take those home as well!

Are we learning a whole lot? Probably not. Are we having fun? For sure.

I did buy myself a very 'teachery' christmas outfit and some earrings...maybe THAT will get me into the Christmas Spirit!

Ready to take on the week and most definitely ready for the break that will follow it!!

-Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing.