Two Years

Yesterday marked two years since my lovely mother passed away. I feel I spent it in a very appropriate manner. I was doing what she loved to do. It was what she received two degrees in. Teaching.
I always keep an old photo of her above my desk and yesterday I definitely looked at it more than usual.

Onto teaching stories.
(Aren't we adorable? Last year right before Christmas break, I made a Christmas photo booth and we had to get a picture of the 5th grade teachers.)

So here are some awesome quotes of students as of late.

Quote #1:

It's the end of the day. Student comes walking towards me, crouched over and hobbling.

"Oooooh. Mrs. Jaeger! I hit my private parts with my lunch box!"

Cut to me turning around because I started laughing! I wish I had told him that he probably should not say that to his female teacher in 5th grade.

Quote #2:

It's math. The kids are working quietly on a problem. One boy is rocking in his seat and raising his hand. This particular child has one of those voices that is not quiet. I don't think I've ever heard him whisper.

"Do you have a question or are you done with the problem?"
"I have a question." With this, he gets up out of his seat and walks halfway towards me, right smack dab in the middle of the class. "I really need to use the bathroom and when I have the feeling to use the bathroom this badly, I usually pee my pants."

Thankfully, I somehow kept a straight face on this one. Thank you for announcing to the class that you pee your pants.

Quote #3:

Yesterday I was trying to be extra happy so that I would not be depressed about what day it was. Apparently the kids noticed.

"Mrs. Jaeger, I love it when you're funny!"

"I'm not funny all the time?"
"Oh...uh...no...I mean...you're extra funny today."

This child's mother even emailed me and added this as her p.s.:

"He swears you are THE funniest teacher at school.  He loves your class!"

My heart is warmed when I read things like that.

Case #4:

I am probably the only one that finds this funny. Half the kids are great at pushing their seats in. Half of them are not. Some of the kids are great at pushing in other kids' chairs. We were playing a game during social studies. One of my students got up without pushing his chair in. Another student stood up to push the first student's chair in, failing to push in his own chair. Thus a third student got up to push in the second student's chair. It was a domino effect of chairs.

The kids found it amusing that I found it so amusing.

It's been a long day. We've had kids dropping their drawers in the hallway, and a biter which ended up being a kid biting herself to get another student in trouble. I just cross my fingers and pray that my kids won't do anything like that.

Back To School Night!

Well, it's arrived. Back to school night. One of my favorite nights of the year. The kids are excited or nervous or couldn't care less. They are adorable and I have a non-stop smile for two hours plastered on my face.
I was just glad my classroom was ready. I started to panic around noon. I took on a few too many projects this summer, especially with the fact that I was gone for one month.
This year, I had different steps for the parents to follow. Even with that addition, many steps were skipped. Oh well. I guess I'm doing packets next year.

28 of my darling 30 students showed up. They were impressed I knew their names. I was impressed with how different they looked from their 4th grade picture.
I love my parents this year. I even had a mom that came in and said something like, "I have had the crappiest parents to work with before this year, but these are some amazing parents!"
Many of my former students made a guest appearance. Lots of hugs (and a guilty happy when a mom teared up and said last year was the best year for her child and she wishes her son could have me again).
I cannot wait until tomorrow. Those adorable children are my kids for nine months. I'll love, scold, cry for, pray for, struggle with, admire, worry about, and nurture those kids.

Here's to the best year yet.

What my classroom looked like two weeks ago:

What my classroom looked like at 3:30 today:

Suitcases for their back to school presents with a bag of pretzels and a foam airplane inside.

The vice-principal gave me this awesome map today.

You'll never know how messy it is behind the emerald curtain. (Okay. There are actually just power cords for the Chromebooks and large bins.)

I incorporated our school's theme this year (airplanes) into my hot air balloon theme. Hey, it fits pretty nicely. I love my new arrow sign outside my classroom.

One of the projects I took on was to make airport signs for the entire school. My favorite are the drinking fountain and bathroom signs. I love them. (Look closely.)

My Favorite Thing

On this lovely Mother's Day, I have been thinking about the things I regret not doing while my mother was alive. I have decided that the biggest regret I have is that I never dragged her (or pushed her) to see my classroom. She passed away the second week into my first year of teaching and the entire summer I set up my room, I continually had the thought that I needed her to see my creation of a classroom. I wanted her to see it...I just never got around to arranging to have her come in.
She taught for several years in school and she was my biggest (albeit quietest) supporter. On one occasion when I received a highly praising email from one of my favorite mentors from BYU, I immediately forwarded it to my parents and they replied with their own lovely email.
It's too late now to see her reaction to my classroom and teaching, but I know she has been with me while I have taught.
If you were to take a moment to step into my classroom, you would find an overabundance of bunting. Banners. Pennants. Garlands. Whatever you want to call them, I have more than a slight obsession with them.
Let's take a look, shall we?

Upon first arriving to my classroom, you run into this little beauty. She took the longest out of any banner I have made. Each circle has 6 layers involved. I am pleasantly surprised to see how well it has held up throughout a year of being displayed in the hallway after so many indoor recesses of hundreds of kids tromping by.

Once you come into the class, there are many cloud garlands that adorn my ceiling to go along with my awesome hot air balloon table numbers.

I love welcome signs. What's not to love about a welcome sign with typewriter font and pinwheels?

There are many little pennants that are hard to find in my classroom. I made this washi tape banner while proctoring the DWA. (Let me say how happy I am that my grade is lucky enough to have Chrome books which allows us to do our SAGE testing in the classroom.)

I don't mind if kids spell my name incorrectly (most of them do), but I do get a little irritated at them asking me...all the time. It's something I really should not get irritated at because they just want to make me a card or draw a picture with me labeled in it. Now I can just point if they ask me.

 Adorning the back whiteboard is the easiest one I have made yet. Glitter clothespins I made last year with cute ribbon the PTA donated and circle punches out of one of my favorite paper packs took no time at all to hang up.

Okay. This one should have come down after March left. I just love it too much. This little guy took my a while to put together. I should have been lazy and just bought green glitter paper, but I am a penny pincher. Thanks to Martha Stewart glitter and a nice layer of Mod Podge, the letters and shamrocks and sparkly without having glitter fall off causing rage to fill my custodian's heart. (You can't have the custodian mad at you. You just can't. That's rule #2 in my book.)

 Sometimes I am lazy and find a great deal at a scrapbook supply sale. A tiny, adorable strand of banners for one dollar? Yes please.
Also, I wish I was not so OCD. I love my map of the US that I made this summer...but Georgia and Delaware do not match with the rest of the colors. I forget what happened this summer, but I had to cut them out of different paper that did not match the other colors. I will sadly be taking down the map, state by state, and replacing it with a new map where all the colors match perfectly. Plus, did you know that you can make any map of anything with just four colors? Yeah. I'll be doing that next time.

My birthday chart even has darling shapes strung out on a picture frame.

 And...my latest creation. I need to get the circles to be more 3D. I ended up hanging this one on my projector screen. I think I may have ran out of room for any more banners.

Even my signs have little banners on them. My Chrome book signs have this cute decoration on them.

As does my correct punctuation sign.

Are you surprised at the lack of bunting in my classroom? Don't worry; there's more. I keep all my seasonal banners in a drawer. I have pennants for Halloween, Thanksgiving, fall, Christmas, winter, 100th day of school, and Valentine's Day.

Just a few things I made and how I fixed my lamination

This week, I was a little slow in making things. I put up my bulletin board fabrics and went to meetings instead.
I did, however, make two decorations for my classroom.
The first is a sign I will put over all the supplies I have for my students. I just cut out the letters and the banners then assembled it with washi tape on the top and bottom.

The other quick make is a calendar. I grabbed a pocket chart from the dollar store as my base. Then I cut out the numbers, days of the week, and cards for the months. It took a while but I wrote the names of the months down in a (hopefully) cute handwriting with an adorable green marker.

My cute husband thought I used different colors for the different seasons. If you want to think I did it that way, then do so. I will seem cooler to you.

The last thing I did was to fix my lamination.
I love the place I get to laminate all my stuff. They are practically across the street from where I live and they have always done an excellent job. I just had one slight problem the last time I went in. Let's take a look, shall we?
I had the darling lady at the lamination place laminate my new "clip" chart (something I will debut later). When I arrived home, I noticed something. Can you spot it?

Let's zoom in a bit.

Ah ha! The lamination on this part was not sealed. Now, as lovely teachers, you probably all know the fix to this, but I was not quite sure what to do. This is for anyone out there who is a lost lamination soul like I was.
Take your local iron and turn it to a low setting. Then, sandwich your failed lamination between a cardboard box and a piece of paper and then go over it once or twice. Seriously it was that simple. It took all of 5 seconds.

(And, no, this is not an ad for Black and Decker.)

Jewelry Holder

This week, I completed two projects (and nearly finished many others). Only one was for my classroom. It is a darling welcome sign.

The other was a jewelry holder.
I have this darling small set of drawers I received from my mother that I used to use for jewelry storage. It is beautiful, but whenever I keep my jewelry hidden away, I forget to put it on. I wanted to create storage that would showcase what I had and also keep it off the dresser.
I headed to Lowe's and bought a vent cover, two metal plates with holes screwed in it, and s hooks.

The assembly was super simple. I went around the outside edge of the vent and the plates with washi tape then and then hooked the plates to the vent with s hooks.

After I hooked the vent to the wall with removable Velcro, I attached more s hooks to hang up necklaces and then put my stud earrings on the metal places.

It looks like I became bored with a heat vent.

More pics and what my students thought of me

According to the janitors, I am official.

I finally brought the rest of my classroom stuff to my classroom. Hopefully I will be in this classroom for several more years because I am sick of moving.

While moving everything to and from the car, it felt like more than this.

I feel as though I need to fill up the rest of my storage that is not hidden away.

My little student supply area tucked away in a corner

I found some more boxes to put in my storage, but it's not enough yet.

Anyways...The last week of school, I asked my lovely students to write a letter to one of my future students to describe what they can expect in my class. I finally had time to read through them and thought they were hilarious. And strange. Some of them wrote that I get crazy if I eat sugar. Not sure where they got that from. I never really ate sugar at school.

Here are some highlights:

"She will tell random jokes that no one understands."

"NEVER turn your homework in late."

"She makes up songs at random times."

"She is very sarcastic."

"She mostly does crazy things in class and she sings what we're talking about."

"I've got to warn you, buy some listening ears because she can talk for hours!" (I was a little confused by this one until I read the rest of the girl's letter and realized she exaggerated everything she said.)

"Be careful, she might catch you when you have juice in a water bottle or pass notes." (Yeah. I once caught a girl with a dark liquid in her clear water bottle. When I asked her about it, she told me she put in the wrong drink that morning...)

"Now see here, don't get her name wrong. Pretend the j is an e."

"Always look forward to greeting her."
"She has cool brothers and sisters."

"She is insane (but not clinically)." (This one is my husband's favorite.)

"She sometimes spits water on the floor."

"She cares about your grades and that you are learning."

"She loves the Beatles"

"She is only strict when she has to be."
"You might want to bring cupcakes for your birthday because she can fit a whole cupcake in her mouth."

"Her pure awesomeness may be too much for you."

"Turn in your homework or else."

"One day she pushed her stool on the floor in the in the middle of an earthquake drill." (It also just so happened to coincide with the exact moment the principal walked in the door.)

"She sometimes jumps out the door."

"If you ever want to irritate her, don't. That's how I got in the principal's office." (The two were unrelated. Promise.)

"Just to give you a heads up, she knows where you live so don't mess with her."

"Don't let her jump in the hall with jazz hands."

And...my favorite letter. I miss those kids.