It's Getting Close to the End!

9 more weeks of school…

Does anyone ever get to this point and start thinking about the end of the year? I have a college student in my room this semester and it gives me a little extra time so today I started thinking about our end of the year awards assembly (so I took the time to print out some of the certificates I’ll need and wrote names on the folders). It made me feel good to get a head start on the end of the year.

We also do a camp week, the last full week of school. Our classes do camp themed activities and it is a fun and great way to end the year together. I think I want to start pulling together some of that stuff now, so that when the end of the year comes, I won’t feel so stressed.

Our district is getting new elementary buildings (in a 5 year process) so essentially ever teacher is moving this year. I get to go to a new building but some teachers are moving to a building to turn around and move to another building in two years, so we are expected to be packed and out of rooms by June 1^st (or June 3^rd now because of snow days). Hopefully this will help the end of the year run smoother.

Fingers crossed.

Do you guys do anything special at the end of the year? I’d love to hear about it.

It's Getting Smelly in Here and Other Animal Stories

AHHHHHH! It’s a skunk…

Well, we didn’t actually see the skunk BUT we sure got to smell him today. This is our schools SECOND animal issue in the past two weeks (I’ll tell you about the first after I finish this).

As I got ready to switch classes today I open the door and the smell hits me. You know the smell, that awful burnt rubber smell is what I call it. At first I think, maybe it is just too much bathroom cleaner (our custodian was out, seemed possible) and then I realize NO, this is skunk. My kids headed to music class and I realized that this SKUNK smell wasn’t just in my head, this skunk smell is REAL and ALL OVER OUR SCHOOL… the kids were struggling, they were moaning and plugging their noses and I tell you what (and I’m sure everyone else would say it was the worst by them) but it was awful outside my door. It was the extremely high level of awful smell that makes your head start to hurt.

Come to find out the story is, as we know it now is that they think there is a skunk living underneath the storage barn on the playground near the school (you know the one that my kids line up next to). The skunk must have sprayed near this which is also near the FAN, that circulates air throughout the school. The smell died down, when they figured this out and turned off the fan system but it was awful. It was the kind of awful that lead them to choose a door that didn’t have the smell near it and leave them open (with a city cop standing guard)…

It was a day…but as I said this was not our first animal problem lately….last week we had….a BAT!

I wasn’t part of the bat but I got to hear about it. In Ohio, our kids are taking the PAARC test and the class was in the computer lab. The assumption is that this bat was hibernating (or whatever bats do) under a computer table and someone must have kicked it but the bat ended up on the floor stunned. Luckily they were able to put a wicker basket of sorts over it before it really “woke back up.” My favorite part of the story is that his little bat (paws? claws? Hands?) were poking through the basket as the teacher and librarian worked to quietly get the custodian – all while the students are taking an IMPORTANT test.

Hopefully, this is the end of animals…but it was too funny not to share!