Five for Friday

I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for the Five for Friday linky. It has been a week of all proportions. I don't want to complain because it is easy to be a negative Nelly, but wahoooo today is Friday. 

This year I currently have 28 students. Last year I only had 22. I think class size has a lot to do with test scores and differentiation help. Think if your class was around twenty students what you would be able to do. I teach with a team of four fourth grade teachers. Like I said I have twenty eight, the others have twenty seven each or more. I realize twenty eight isn't a bad number, but my classroom is very small and has little room for desks, chairs, and twenty eight students and one teacher. How do people manage with almost 30 kiddos?!

I got a new student this week and I like to make all my copies weeks ahead of time, and now I have to go run one extra copy...... AGH!?@#! Sorry my OCD is coming out.

Today we finally read our Scholastic News article that was titled Ruby the Brave. I was looking around on Bloglovin' and found that Mary over at A Classroom Full of Smiles wrote her latest blog post on Ruby Bridges. I thought to myself AHA we taught about the same person, but used different resources. I am considering going back and utilizing her free resources to review Ruby Bridges story. 

Oh the dirty little pigs who have come into my classroom and junked it up, no sir not today. Last week I went through my student's desks to find all sorts of treasures including: cookies from our Christmas Party, unfinished work, glue balls (yes they used all my glue sticks and made balls out of them), shredded erasers, broken pencils, giblets of all sorts and more. I lowered the boom and told them I was going to remove their desk privileges from the classroom if they couldn't live without being filthy. Day 1 of the Friday desk check...........drum roll please.......... SPOTLESS!!!

This week we began our new book study on Oliver Twist written by Charles Dickens. Why not expose these little hooligans to some traditional literature? It will hopefully evoke a love and passion for literature. Not really, we just have a program called Literacy Collaborative and it is a very strict and structured literacy program and this was what the kids voted on for our read loud.  

This week I had to go to the orthodontist. I haven't been since I got my braces removed in 8th grade. We aren't even going to discuss how long ago that was. The reason I went is because my permanent retainer came off and the glue had to be removed from my canine teeth. The orthodontist was so proud that I actually still had my old school retainers. They unfortunately didn't fit well, so I had to order some new ones. Yikes $300 later I will be having some straight teeth for the upcoming wedding festivities. Note: the picture above was the old retainer, I haven't gotten my new ones yet!