Saying Goodbye, and a cute chick project

I cannot believe tomorrow is my very last day of student teaching! :(
Since tomorrow we are going to the zoo, we had a little goodbye party in the classroom today. Yesterday Mrs. Eagle had mentioned that she'd bring in a treat for the class, to celebrate. She ended up bringing potato ships and juice boxes, because things tend to go poorly when we give the kids really sugary snacks. They go bananas. (She also brought red velvet cupcakes just for the teachers!) But the sweetest thing ever is that Kite went home, remembered that we were having a goodbye party, and asked her mother to buy cupcakes for the party! It meant a lot to me that she thought of me! You should have seen the cupcakes. They were all different colors, bright colors, like red and yellow and blue and orange and green and purple. The kids sure loved them! And you could tell what color cupcakes most of them (especially Starling and Jay) had, by the colors of their lips, cheeks, and noses! How they managed to get frosting on their noses is beyond me.


The kids all gave me cards that they made. They were so excited to give them to me, and crowded around me waiting for me to read every single one! And Mrs. Eagle and the assistants gave me a gift certificate to a local teacher store, a package of 700 stickers, and some cute notepads, for my future classroom! Also, one of the assistants, who is from Mexico, made me some authentic, delicious flan. I LOVE FLAN! 


I'm going to miss them all so much. I'm sure I've mentioned that before. Remember how attached I was to my preschoolers at Sky Elementary? I've spent four times as much time with the Tree Elementary kids, and a lot of that time was actually teaching and interacting with them, so I think I am at least four times as attached to them! They are attached to me too. Jay may be the one who will miss me the most. He's a lonely little guy, who is always a couple steps behind the rest of the world, because he's usually daydreaming about things like outer space or Superman. I read him his Planets book every day during silent reading, answer his endless questions about outer space (although half the time my answer is, "I don't know!"), sit with him on the bus whenever we go on a field trip, talk to him when he's nervous about going to an afterschool activity or an assembly, help him with his spelling, and more. He's taken to walking up to me and spontaneously hugging me. I think my being gone will be weird for him.


Martin will probably miss me too. Every day when he comes into the classroom, the first thing he says is, "Hi Miss Read!" Even if there are other teachers in the room, for some reason he singles me out. Throughout the whole ten weeks he has asked me, "Are you going to be here on May 4th?" because he knew that May 3rd was my last day and he was trying to get a different answer. Martin is really good with dates. He has everyone's birthdays memorized. 


I'm sure Starling and Rosella will miss me, too. Who is going to play the rice bottle game with them during reading? 


I really am planning on going back to visit, though. I sure wish the school had a job opening for a special ed teacher, because if I had the chance, I'd stay! 


Even though I won't be in a classroom for a while, I'll still be blogging. I have a lot of things to catch up on in this blog. In the mean time, here's one of the projects we did during egg week! I found something like it on Pinterest, but it was only a picture and no instructions. Its pretty easy to figure out though. I used fun foam to make it more durable, but you can also use colored paper or card stock. Just cut out an egg shape, draw a jagged line on it in the middle and cut along the jagged line, and cut out the shape of a chick. Decorate your chick however you like, by adding things like googly eyes and a beak. Take a clothespin. On the side of the clothespin that is meant to pinch the clothes, glue half of the egg to the top and half to the bottom. Its best to glue just the edges of the egg halves, so that the rest of the halves stick out past the end of the clothespin. Then turn the clothespin over, and glue the egg to the bottom part of that side. Glue it face down. It works best to just glue his left wing to the clip, so that the chick also sticks out past the end of the clothespin.
If you are using Fun Foam, it will take a long time to dry, and you should really put something heavy on it and then not touch it for about 24 hours. If you use colored paper or card stock, it will probably stick better and dry faster. Anyway, here is what you end up with! 


How it looks when you just hold the clothespin normally:

How it looks when you pinch the clothespin open:

Pretty cute, right? This is great for an egg unit or a bird unit. There's a lot of fine motor work, so you might have to really help some students. Also, I used cheap Dollar Tree clothespins that don't open very wide. If you get regular clothespins from Target or someplace, they'll open wider and make it look even cooler! 


Thanks for reading, everyone! Come back soon!