Teacher Flattens Student!

A funny, embarrassing thing happened to me today. It will go down as one of those teaching moments I will never forget. I smashed a student today! Yeah, smashed, crushed, flattened- whatever you want to call it. The fire department came today for our annual surprise fire drill. After the drill instead of going directly into class and back to work, I thought it would be a great learning experience to let my class walk around the fire truck. They got all excited and thought it was great. I got out the camera and started taking picture of the class in front of the the fire truck. Just as we were finishing, the six firefighters and the principal came walking out of the school. The kids were in awe to see real firemen!! They were giving them high fives and really getting into it so I saw a Kodak moment. I stepped back to get a better shot and didn't see the smallest firstie in my class behind me. I tripped and came crashing down right on top of her. She started crying! Her cute little frilly skirt was slipping off and I couldn't tell if she was hurt or embarrassed by losing her skit. I asked her if she was all right and she wailed, "NOOO!" Needless to say, I felt terrible, horrible, and awful!! After a few hugs from me and the principal she stopped crying. The poor girl is probably scarred for life. She won't be able to look at a fire truck again without having nightmares of her teacher smashing her flat as a pancake!

Anyhow, here are some fun but educational activities we've been doing this week with a little touch of the Halloween spirit thrown in. Notice- they are educational and not just fluff :) Click on the picture for a PDF.
This is just a fun little sight word practice page. I put the six sight words on my huge die and the kids took turns rolling it, reading the words and coloring in a space.

This is a graph we did to get the kiddos thinking about Halloween spooks. Next week we are doing a writing activity with the spooks so hopefully they will know which one they want to write about.

This is a game from Math Investigations called "On and Off". The kids are given a target number. They get that many chips and drop them on a sheet of paper. How boring is a plain sheet of paper? So I have them drop the chips on the sheet of paper with the weird-looking pumpkin on it! Then they record how many counters are on and off the paper. It reinforces number combinations.

OH, we played the Jack-o-Lantern sorting and my kids are crazy about it! It was in a previous post. Check it out. It was a big time hit with the kiddos!