11th day in the classroom

On Thursday January 24th I had my 11th day in the classroom.  When I showed up at 1:30 in Mrs. Almond's class, she had a substitute teacher.  The substitute teacher said that she didn't have anything for me to do, so I headed on down to Mrs. Greenfield's classroom.  They were not there, so I looked around and found them in the library.  They got to pick out books for silent reading and then they got to take them home.  Back in the classroom, Mrs. Greenfield had the students get out their squiggle word journals.  They turned to a page and found a squiggly line.  They had to make the line into a picture and color it.  After they finished their picture, they had to write two complete sentences.  Then the best part was that she had each student come to the front of the class and show their picture and then read their sentence to the class.  It was fun seeing how creative the students were.  They all had such different ideas about what they could make out of the same squiggle.  Mrs. Greenfield looked at all of their sentences and had them fix different mistakes like capitalizations, spelling, and punctuation marks.  This assignment took a good amount of time, so when they were all finally done sharing it was time to start getting ready to go.  Mrs. Greenfield is such a fun teacher, I love watching how she interacts and plays with her students.  One of the kids favorite things that she does is when she passes out their take home folders she stands in one spot and yells out a kids name and then tosses his folder to him or her and they try to catch it.  She constantly yells, "heads up".  While she is handing out folders, she always has the student of the day pick some helpers and they pass out all the students work to put in their take home folders.  It is a really fun time of day for the kids.
After all the craziness, all the students sit at the rug and she reads to them until its time to go.  During reading time at the end of the day the student of the day gets to pick some friends to help clean up the floor.  They crawl under the desks and pick up little pieces of trash.  Something about this makes it really special so they love cleaning.  When they are done, the student of the day always gets to sit by Mrs. Greenfield in a special chair.