Happy Friday, everyone! S’long, week 6! I’ll celebrate your grand exit by highlighting the best of my week.

1. My Brilliant Students: Last week, I did a fun warm-up with the iPads where I asked everyone to find a picture on the internet to represent how they are feeling today. Many of them did exactly what you’d expect – they found pictures of tired puppies or crying babies or emoticons to represent their feelings. It was fun, but it wasn’t especially challenging. So this week, I repeated the activity with one caveat – they may not use any emoticons or pictures that have faces in them. What a challenge! At first, they all balked and whined. But within minutes, it was like watching a slow-motion miracle as each student suddenly brightened up with an idea and set to work. Smiling devilishly, they dug through google images until they found just the perfect one to share. I let each student stand up and show their pictures, then ask the class to guess how they felt. They had pictures of fireworks, red monsters, trampolines, stoves, trains, and many more really exciting ideas. The warm-up became a real challenge in thinking metaphorically and stepping outside of the comfort zone. Students had just as much fun guessing the meaning as they did explaining their own pictures. The train, for instance, represented feeling motivated and charging ahead. The red monster represented anger. But you know what was the very best part of all? The kinds of students who were enjoying this – all of my struggling readers and writers were laughing, raising their hand, and having a blast. This was such an unexpectedly fun way to start class!

2. ORCA Testing: I finished Phase 1 of my data collection for my dissertation, which involved getting 180 kids on laptops to take an online reading assessment (looks a lot like facebook). Oy. Uff da. Now that was stressful. Thanks to Murphy’s Law, everything I planned to go wrong actually went right, and everything I couldn’t have foreseen went terribly wrong. The room I booked was unavailable, the school’s internet went down, students didn’t follow directions and their data was unusable. I haven’t felt this tense since I watched ‘Gravity’ in the theater last weekend (pssst… go see that! What a thriller!). BUT, I think I have enough usable data, and it feels really good to have at least one piece of the project behind me. Now to grade all of them!

3. Rocket Pencils: I blogged earlier in the week about using Rocket Pencils (Twist ‘n Write) with my 8th graders. I shared them with a few new students this week, and they are loving them!

4. Scholarship Letter: We finished writing all 5 paragraphs of the Scholarship Letter this week – phew!  Now next week, all we have to do is peer revise and edit, and the final draft can be due on Thursday. Guess I know what I’ll be grading all next weekend?! I’m incredibly proud of my students because every single one of them – without fail – has been working hard at this assignment and they all have a full draft. This is no small feat! It was accomplished only through tons of encouragement, support, and careful scaffolding.

5. Something Fluffy and Pink: Okay confession – I MAY have purchased a tutu this week at Target. What? It was an impulse buy! What girl doesn’t need a pink tutu? I’m actually just thinking ahead to Halloween. Mrs. D always ‘brings it’ for dress up days!

So how was your week?