falling out of bed and loving my students

alright, so I fell out of bed last night... Don't worry, it's only 18 inches to the floor from my mattress!! Go to my roommate, Tricia's, blog here for details... ha, Trish is a great story teller.

I was nervous again this morning, but as soon as my students walked through the door, I was on the ball again. I really do have such a great class. Even the couple students that challenge my authority are great (One of these students is so intelligent that he just gets bored with the pace of the rest of the class and he begins to find other mischevious things to do! My work will be to keep him busy!!).

BRAG MOMENT. :) My students are seriously awesome. Last week, we gained an extra minute of recess by being the quickest and quietest to line up after recess (I told them before we went to the gym that we had to show up the 3rd and 5th grade students... It worked!). The Chapel Director also gave homework on Friday for the 4th and 5th graders to write down what happened during the first 7 days of creation. MY students :) remembered (mostly because I wrote it on our assignment board and explained a simple format to get them started) and had their 7 days written out for Chapel today. Ha, we totally showed up the 5th graders again. I went into Miss V.'s classroom (the 5th grade teacher) after school today, and she had "7 Days of Creation" written on her assignment board. She said her students were really motivated after the younger students knew more answers than they did. Glad my students can inspire others to do their homework :).

My discipline system is using a "3 Strikes" philosophy. The first strike is a warning, and the third strike is a parent note or phone call. Today, the students brainstormed possibilities for the second strike's consequence, and they had suggestions like "Extra Homework!" "No Recess!" "Pushups!!" (When "pushups" were mentioned, 4 of my 5 boys dropped to the ground in a pushup contest! I laughed and brought it to a stop...) I knew the extra homework consequence would result in lots of extra work for me, so I vetoed that idea. What they finally came up with is hysterical to me. If they have two strikes, then they miss the first 5 minutes of recess, BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!! One girl was concerned that if she missed recess, she would miss her exercise time for the day. (Ha! Cracks me up that she thought of that!!) So after missing 5 minutes of "exercise time", the boys have to give me 20 pushups and the girls have to give me 25 jumping jacks. (The girls were concerned that they couldn't do very many pushups, but the boys thought the girls doing 20 jumping jacks wasn't even to their 20 pushups, so the compromise ended up being 2o pushups/25 jumping jacks.) Oh my goodness, it was such an animated discussion and I loved every minute of it!

Needless to say, one student already missed 5 minutes of recess AND gave me 20 pushups. Ha, I look like a drill sergeant at recess.

Not only do I let the students choose their consequences, I also gave all the school subjects new names. Math is now "Puzzles"; Science is now "Exploration"; History is now "True Stories"; Spelling and Penmanship are now "Word Play". I also let the students pick their class jobs because I figure they will get to choose their jobs in real life, so why not in the classroom??

I think I do this teaching thing really differently from others, but my kids are eating it up!