Notes from Miss Dennis: A Toast to the New Year!

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

A Toast to the New Year!

So the kiddos came back today, and my goodness were they quiet for most of the morning (I think they were probably still asleep!)!!

My ESOL teacher/CQI partner and I are so on the same wavelength it's scary! She emailed me yesterday afternoon asking if she could have this morning for a whole group lesson on resolutions (like I would say no!). Turns out she had picked the same book that I had for today's activities! She read Squirrel's New Year's Resolution to them, and then had them define "resolution" and brainstorm their own New Year's Resolution. Cut to the block of time after our first Media Center visit of the year (where they were reminded to be choosing AR books for checkout) where we used the resolution draft to create these Ms. Durning-inspired "toasts" (I saw this post last year and bookmarked it for just this occasion... oh the days before pinterest...). I put them on our door while the kiddos rocked out to Cara's amazing NYE freebie! I printed this up yesterday, laminated it, and cut it out while watching winter premieres last night. I set them up as a rotation at each table group and let the kiddos get to work, rotating freely between them. They did an AMAZING job! Not everyone had time to get to all of them, so we'll finish them up tomorrow. (I'll try to remember to take my camera to school)

Oh, and I got a new student today, he seems super with it, and has the most gorgeous handwriting I've ever seen for a 7 year-old boy! My sweetie who has my telephone number had his parent send a text today saying that "he says hi and he misses his classmates." AND I got news that one of my girls was involved in a motorcycle (it had three wheels, not sure if it was a kid-sized or adult-sized one) accident over the break and was in the hospital for five days after fracturing part of her face. I want more details, but this was all I could gather in the two minutes that I had to be in the front office picking up my new kiddo. It warms my heart to know that she really wanted to come to school today, but couldn't, so she sent mom in to pick up her homework for the week (omg, precious!).

So without further ado, here are our "Toasts to the New Year!" I just printed a picture from this site and traced the bread onto manilla cardstock and then cut 2x2" squares using the paper cutter. The kiddos used a brown crayon to "toast" their bread and then wrote their resolution (from this morning, we checked it for correct spelling and grammar) on the pat of butter! (ps how hilarious are the 'toast-its' for sticky notes??)