For My Fantastic Students

My lovely students, this is my closing hope and prayer for you. It´s a quote from Nelson Mandela:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be talented or gifted? Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of the Most High God. Playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure. We were born to make manifest the glory that is within us. As we let God's light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fears, our presence begins to liberate others."

The End of the Road

I saw the students to their respective busses Wednesday afternoon and turned to walk back to my classroom. Our vice principal walked over to me and said, "We're gonna miss you next year. You can tell you're a good teacher because your students always came to school. They like learning with you so they'd rather come to school than stay at home."

And with a 97% attendance rate, our class has done a great job. Thank you for making your child's attendance this year a priority. I was so privileged to work with each of you.

All my best----
Miss Conradi

Ants on a Log

After hearing about the 1800+ donuts my class sold, my mom----who's a school nurse in Williamsburg---paid for my kids to get a healthy snack instead. The result: Ants on a Log.

Donuts for Darfur

We raised $400 for Save Darfur through our Krispy Kreme Fundraiser. The students' compassion and openness has been inspiring.

One more week to go...........

On the loose

A limerick:

Albert Einstein's our class pet

A meaner hamster you can't really get

He isn't a chum

He bit Conradi's thumb

And now out of the cage he has fled!

EGAD!! He's loose!

So far, 3 fish, 3 tadpoles, and 3 frogs have died under our care. The only survivors (unless we find Einstein alive) are our caterpillars tucked into their coccoons. Let's hope the butterflies make it out fine.

50 Ways to Love Your Lever

We're studying simple machines these days. . . .


It's not a vision in your head, she said to me.
But a machine when you've work to do simply.
I'd like to help you understand mechanically,
There must be fifty ways to love your lever.
She said, it's got a fulcrum or a pivot point, you know,
Relative to the points of effort and of load.
And what is lost in force is gained in motion, so
There must be fifty ways to love your lever.

Chorus:
Just slip out the jack, Mack.
Use a pry bar, Carl.
Those pliers employ, Roy.
Just listen to me.
Work that pump, Gump.
Fill a wheel barrow, Cheryl.
Magnify the force, Doris,
And let your lever be.

She said, there's three kinds of levers you can use,
When you've heavy weights to lift or motion to infuse.
And I realized that though she was missing a few screws,
There must be fifty ways to love your lever.
In some, the fulcrum's in between the effort and the load.
Or at one end as in the nutcracker you hold.
In others, the effort's in the middle mode.
There must be fifty ways to love your lever.

It's fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A

The YMCA has a great program in Richmond. Second graders go to the Y once a week for 7 weeks for swimming lessons and they absolutely love it. After today's swim, one kid quipped, "I want tomorrow to be Wednesday again."

So precious.

Nothing like a day at school spent in our pajamas......

update

Our hamster's name has been changed from Albert Einstein to Dracula.

Our reasons are many, but I'll let the kids write stories about the biting incident. My thumb hurts too much to type.

Hot Dog!

April kicks off National Poetry Month, so here's the first one my class penned together. I'm pretty impressed with them.

ODE TO THE HOT DOG

You are summer in my mouth.
You are tasty like pepperoni pizza.
I drizzle mustard
---yellow as the sun---
and ketchup
---red as a heart---
on your lovely, pink skin.

The bun is your shelter
but it doesn't keep you safe
from my mouth.

Reading. . .

On Wednesday afternoons, students from our class pair up with their Kindergarten reading buddies. It's been a really wonderful time.

WELCOME. . .

We have two new additions to our class: Diana and Albert Einstein.






We bought Einstein with money earned at our bake sale. A snake was our first choice (teacher veto), followed by a prairie dog. We settled on a hamster.

You can't always get. . .

"You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
you can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, you might find
You get what you need"
~The Rolling Stones

CONRADI CASH has been the currency of Room 12 for the last week. Recess? 20 dollars. Need to sharpen your pencil? 1 dollar. Lunch? 5 dollars. Water during class? 10 dollars. And the list goes on. . . .

The students are learning about the economic choices we make and about the differences between our wants and our needs. It's definitely been fun watching some kids opt out of recess (reading instead in order to save money), and kids are definitely more conscientious about their pencils (not wanting to fork over 5 dollars for a new one.)

I WILL EAT GREEN EGGS AND BACON

As part of our Dr. Seuss celebration on March 2nd, we ate green eggs and bacon. The kids had a blast and the smell of bacon wafted through the halls of JL Francis (inciting jealousy from other classes).

Fun times!

Cucumber finger sandwiches and the Civil War

What a fun day we had with Thomas Jefferson and Abe Lincoln! Most of the kids dressed in their Sunday best in anticipation of our special guests. TJ and Abe were incredible with the kids. They shared about their lives and asked us questions about ours. We ate cucumber and cream cheese finger sandwiches, cream puffs, and miniature brownies with our tea. This was certainly a highlight of our year!

Tea with Teddy, Abe, and TJ

At 2 pm this Thursday, Abe Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Teddy Roosevelt will join our class for a tea party in honor of President's Day. Please dress up in your finest clothes for the occasion. Finger sandwhiches and cookies will be served.

Chinese Restaurant Field Trip

We put our chopstick skills to practice and headed on the bus to a Chinese Restaurant yesterday for an authentic Chinese lunch. We stuffed our faces with egg rolls, beef and broccoli, crispy chicken and lo mein!

Role Models

Students need to memorize these quotes by next Monday:

"Freedom is not free." ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There's not an American in this country free until every one of us is free." ~Jackie Robinson

I spy with my eye. . . .

Homophones are words that sound the same but are not spelled the same and have different meanings. We have been thinking up as many different homophone pairs as we can. We made flash cards and are playing games with them. PBS' Between the Lions features a great homophone duet here.



One fun activity we did this week involved writing silling sentences using homophones. Here are some of them:

Two kids got in too much trouble and are going to the principal's office.

The boy tried to write with his right foot.

He had to tow the truck with his giant toe.

I read my homework until I was red in the face.


If you think of any good ones, we'd love to hear from you here. :)

"Why didn't they switch to the fork when it was invented?"

A much promised adventure occured today: we learned--or tried to learn, at least--- how to use chop-sticks. (This actually is tied in to our SOLs: we've been studying Ancient China.)

I was mortified by how bad I was at showing kids to use them. Some picked it up quickly, but others struggled a lot and were more inventive in their technique. (My personal favorite: the two handed double-grip used by N. in the bottom picture.) We ate goldfish, marshmallows, baby carrots, and rice krispie treats. Then they took them to the cafeteria with them to attack the meal du jour: taco salad.

Such fun times. . . .

Ick. . . . Ooblick!

Some kids thought the slime was fun. . .


After studying the properties of solids, liquids, and gases, we entered into the mysterious world of OOBLICK this afternoon. Ooblick---an easy-to-make slime--- is both a solid and a liquid. We definitely earned our messy stripes today and I'm sure I'll have parents shaking their heads as they scrape green goop off their children's pants, shoes, and faces.



Others weren't quite as enthusiastic. . .

RIP

Langston Hughes AND William Shakespeare died last night. We have a 3 for 3 fish death rate in our classroom and we're not sure we should get another pet. Freddie wants us to get a parrot and a couple of others want us to get a dog. We'll see. . . .

Mad Science

We've had fun with Science experiments of late. These pictures are of some Erosion studies and we're about to venture onto Planet OOBLICK this week. Check again for pictures of that. Please know you are always welcome to come to our class to help us learn more. We would love your brains.