A Little Late . . I hope you don't mind.

I'm back from my whirlwind trip to Houston this weekend. You know, I'm not really a sports fan. . . but even I figured it out when we left from Chicago to Houston and the plane was completely full on Thursday night and then coming back this morning it was full again, that a sport just might be involved! . . I guess that the All Star Basketball game that was held in Houston had a lot to do with that!

I didn't go there for the silly old game! I went to see my daughter and her husband. We had a great time, the guys golfed, and we got pedicures, shopped, ate, shopped, ate, and ate some more!

Yesterday the sun was perfect and we took some time to sit by the pool (fully clothed mind you!). It didn't take long and I was pink. . . no red. . .
no burned bright red! YIKES!

Of course my face looked even worse by the end of the night. After lots of aloe and a few prayers, I decided that I was going to live! Silly me, I know better, and I don't like to burn. . . . but being from Michigan, I feel so pale and sun deprived!

Now on to what we did for Valentine's Day. I read all about everyone's over the weekend, and I was itching to get back and share mine too!

We start the day with a breakfast in our classroom. The kids always think it's so fun to eat in the room, when they normally eat in the gym! It doesn't take much to make them happy!

Do you know Sheree from Peterson's Pad?  She teaches first grade and had some great ideas for Valentine's Day.

I know that there are a lot of activities out there that you can do with the candy hearts, but Sheree's were cute, easy, and perfect for the time we had to do them in our class.

First they had to tally how many they had, then they made a graph with them. I love how this one below actually put the hearts on the chart since that's the way this child sees things best.

Then they had a couple questions to answer that pertained to their actual graph. Each person's graph turned out differently because they all had their own individual boxes.

Our boxes didn't have white hearts as the charts asked for, but they had blue ones which weren't on the charts. This was an easy fix for us to change so it fit our needs.

We also celebrated the 100th day of school in the afternoon on Thursday. 

Our building has only 6 classes 

(2 kinders, 2 firsts, and 2 seconds).

Each teacher planned a 25 minute activity. The classes moved from room to room to do each activity and finished up just in time to go home. (Gotta love those days when the time flies!)

I visited my friend Corinna Gandara in Hawaii. . . well, I didn't actually visit her. . .Truthfully, I visited her blog. . . . and you will want to too. Her blog is called Surfin' Through Second Grade. 

She is very cool and fun and let's me live vicariously through her adventures in surfing!

These next two activities are from her blog.

In my room the kinders made some gorp with many different kinds of foods. It was so cute to listen to them count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 over and over as they got to each bowl.

When they were done, IF they counted right, they had 100 things to eat.

Some kids automatically made patterns all on their own!

We asked some to make addition groups like 3+5 to see what the answer was.

Then the first and second graders had to find 100 ways to make 100.

 I let the 2nd graders just make them any way they could. Some of them caught on and saw a pattern to be sure they didn't miss any of them. I love it when the light bulb comes on and math makes sense to them. 

With the first graders I had them stay with me and watch the pattern grow together. It didn't take long for them to catch on. 

We didn't have time to finish. So I told them to take it home, finish it, and return it to me tomorrow and I'll give them a treat. I sure hope lots of them continued making them at home.

And just look how neat this one below is! Don't cha just wish every one wrote this neatly 

and can keep their numbers inside the boxes!!!

Thanks for hanging in there and reading about our fabulous day on Thursday. I loved reading all of yours too! It's so interesting to see how each school does different things.

Patty