Tom Cruise Happy & Math!

IT'S SPRING BREAK!!!

I am Tom-Cruise-Jumping-On-The-Couch

 insanely happy about this break!!!!

picture source

I've tried not to bring it to my blog much, but this has been an incredibly stressful school year.    I'm not someone who has a problem with change.  I actually like change.  However, the past two years have been lots of "NEW", some of which makes sense and lots of which just confounds me.  I sometimes wonder if the people that make these changes think we run magic shows in our classroom because the reality of what we teachers have to do under the conditions we are given seems to not often be taken into consideration.  And if they don't make the goal impossible to achieve, it usually is impossible to do in the constraints and time lines given. 

But, in the words of Dory. . .  I just keep swimming!  So, this is why I am Tom Cruise happy about SPRING BREAK!!!   I did bring a lot of work home, but it's just nice to be away from the building for a bit.

Before I left, I had to take a picture of my classroom.  As you can probably tell from my blog, I am a literacy person.  That's my love, that's my strong suit, that's probably what most of my posts are about.  Which is why I had to laugh when I looked around my room yesterday. 

Math has taken over my classroom! 

This is my reading bulletin board, not that you can tell!

We just finished up a chapter that focused on finding area and volume as well as standard and metric measurement.  I know the first two posters, area of a rectangle and area of a parallelogram, are kind of redundant.  However, I made the posters to follow how the concepts are introduced and discussed in our book. These are just the posters on my reading bulletin board.  My actual math bulletin board is equally covered!  Here is a close-up of some of our posters in no particular order:

I look at this and am a bit amazed that my 5th graders are learning this now.  I don't think I learned any of this until I was well into middle school.   My parents tell me the same thing when we talk about math at conferences.  It's funny how what we learn changes over time.  But, as I said, it's even funnier to walk around my room and see all these math posters.  Usually, my room is covered in literacy anchor charts and posters!

So, as I type this on Friday morning, I am delighted with what the first day of spring break holds.  I am off today for a mani and pedi and then some shopping to find a new dress for Easter.  Perfect way to spend the first day!  I have a couple of little posts planned for during the week on some emergency procedures, class jobs, and maybe a quick post on a professional book I just finished.  Other than that, I'm kicking back! 

See you after Easter!