Best spot in the room!

Thanks to the generosity of the Nelson County Education Foundation (NCEF), our classroom was given $500 to put into a reading center.  So far the center has a new carpet, four bean bag chairs, two bungee cord chairs (definitely the class favorite), reading posters, and many new books.  I still haven’t spent all of the money, so I will continue to add things to the center until the money runs out!  The kids have been really excited about this, and have done a nice job keeping it neat and clean.  It has been a great encouragement during silent reading time.

 

Snowman Christmas Craft

These turned out so stinkin’ cute!  Even the kids who went a little wild and crazy with their snowmen, still ended up with adorable little ones.  I wish I had taken a picture of the whole group.

If anyone is interested in creating their own sock snowman, here is the link with the directions.  These are very easy to make.  I even put a few kids in charge of the rice and they were able to fill them up with no problem.

http://pinlavie.com/snowman-sock/

Baseball Game

We took the 4th graders to The Hillcats baseball game in 2008!  It was a lot of fun!

Another oldie but goodie!

This is a newspaper clipping from my first year of teaching.  A presenter from Jamestown came to visit and shared many artifacts with my students.  This is a picture of one of my students in costume and a write up about the program.

 

Snow Day #17!

Well, I am sitting here at home on our 17th snow day of the year!  I almost said that I cannot believe that we have missed that much, but thinking back it feels like forever since December.  As we were reviewing math from the first and second six weeks yesterday, it was difficult for the kids to remember a lot of it.  There have just been so many breaks!

So, while I am waiting to return to school so that I can get permission slips to post my current students’ pictures on here, I am going to go a little old school and post some pictures from past years.  I sure have plenty 🙂

 

This is a photo of my second group of fourth graders.  This was taken at Jamestown.  I wish I had a picture of every class like this.  This class was interesting, because somehow I ended with just 6 boys that year and 15 girls!  We had a lot of fun that year.

 

 

This is a picture of the sweet little classroom where I spend my first 7 years of teaching. This was my fourth grade classroom.  I moved into my current room when I switched to fifth grade.

 

This is a picture of field day.  I love field day!  This was (I believe) my second group of fourth graders.

 

An exciting new week!

So, after weeks of prep and also many missed days due to snow, our 5th grade writing SOLs are officially completed. We don’t have any information on scores yet, and probably won’t for awhile, but I know that everyone worked hard.

Now that the tests are over, I feel a renewed excitement for teaching the other subjects. I spent a lot of time over the weekend planning for the upcoming week, and I am excited about some of our activities and lessons. I will attempt to document some of these on here during the week.

Have a great week! Oh and it’s almost Spring Break!!

And away we go…

Hello, I am Leslie James.

Well, I am starting a classroom blog for a few reasons.

First, I want to keep track of the fun we have in class and the many different activities and adventures that we encounter.

Second, I would love to have a place where parents, family, and friends can peek into what goes on during our days together.

Finally, I thought it would just be fun to share teaching ideas with others.

So hopefully I will keep up with this.  🙂