If You Give a First Grader a Pancake...

...they'll be hyper for the rest of the day! Every year around this time we read If You Give a Pig a Pancake. It's one of the first books in our reading series that they recognize as something they've seen before and a book you can really get at the bookstore or library. Of course, after we read the book, we HAVE to make pancakes! I've always just had pancakes and syrup but this year first grade has an amazing TA and she was having none of it! Soooo... we ended up with blueberries, chocolate chips, vanilla chips, peanut butter chips, sprinkles and whipped cream. Well, did you know that sprinkles make pancakes AMAZING?!? I had no idea! They really were fantastic. As for making the kids hyper, well, I already knew about that so we did the pancakes at the end of the day on Friday. Teacher payback for giving them doughnuts for breakfast!

Oh, our forever boxes were a great success. Here's a finished one:

Have a great weekend! It's in the 60s here today after a rainy, freezing week and I'm going to enjoy every minute of it!

I'm Ready for Spring!

What a week! We been out of school for five days! We only had about four inches of snow but the nighttime freezing and a holiday today kept us home. I can't believe I'm saying this but wow! I'm so ready to teach for a week straight.

So, we weren't in school for St. Valentine's day but I always have the kids bring in their valentines way early. Filling them out was the homework for last Monday night and they brought them in on Tuesday so they're all sitting at school just waiting for us! Tomorrow seems like a good St. Valentine's day for us!

My fantastic TA had the BEST idea for valentine  holders. She got in touch with a cigar shop and had them hold cigar boxes for us. They gave us over 30 boxes for FREE!! They are beautiful! Some are so pretty we decided not to paint or decorate them and use them for storage around the classroom (dry erase markers, pencils, etc.).

We let each child pick a box. We pulled sticks with their numbers on them to be fair! They sanded them down and we spray painted them gold and silver. They are in the process of decorating them with buttons, beads and colored pasta. It's amazing to see their personalities come out in the way they decorate! Of course, because of the snow it's still a work in progress. We are planning to use bags tomorrow for the valentines and we have re-branded the boxes as "forever boxes" for them to keep all kinds of special items in.

I heard one cutie say about the Fruit Loop necklace he was currently sucking on "I'm not eating this...I'm just sucking on it because I want to keep it in my forever box!" Of course, we let him know that he might as well eat it because it wasn't going to make it in the box!

Here's a picture of the cigar boxes before we did anything to them. They really are beautiful. Once we get the forever boxes finished I'll post some pictures of them, too!

Wow, when I look at the table I see no fewer than two coffee cups and a Diet Coke tumbler. I might have a problem! :)