Mostly Work with a little running

It is ALMOST THE END OF THE YEAR!  Yeah!  At this time of the year it is hard to keep students motivated and under control.  Yowzers!  They are done, done, done and the year needs to end.

Today though we did a couple of very fun things.  First, we have been studying the rain forest.  We concluded it with  a presentation for the parents.  The kids sang, read poems, shared research, shared pages of class books we had made and on and on.  Then we had "rain forest" food the parents had made.  It was excellent. All in all it was a huge success. The kids did well, abandoning the goofy things they were doing during our rehearsals and the parents loved it.

Then we had a guest presenter at our school.  He did two different presentations.  Originally my grade was scheduled for the first one which was on cute little salamanders. But we couldn't go to that one because of our presentation. Our librarian nicely switched us to the second one which was about snakes. Some of you know I am not fond of snakes, not one little bit.  This Middlebury College Professor is a herpetologist.  He showed many many many slides of snakes.  I must say he was incredibly interesting and the kids were spellbound. There were 5 classes of third and fifth graders and he totally had them under control.  He was engaging and very funny while imparting an incredible amount of information. After he talked about each kind of snake he would go back to a map of Vermont which showed all the towns.  He would have highlighted where the snakes could be found.  An amazing amount were in the town I teach in.  The kids would cheer like they had scored some huge victory.  One snake was a huge black water snake which was not found many places but surprise surprise - it was in abundance (he didn't want to say infested because infested implies something bad) in our town!  He kept telling the kids to document snake findings and email them to him to get credit for locating snakes in their town.  I am sure many went home to immediately get out the cameras. Now I only spent about 1/4 of the time looking at the slides as they were a bit too much for me.  The speaker spent a lot of time telling why snakes (for the most part) are not dangerous and why we shouldn't be afraid of them.  One of my boys kept turning around and grinning at me as they know exactly how I feel. I say it doesn't matter if they are not venomous (I learned not to say poisonous today.) If one bit me I would die of a heart attack and the end result would be the same.  I spent a lot of my lunch hour telling the teachers who weren't there about the presentation, then I came home and shared many of the stories with my husband.  That guy was some great presented to so fascinate me who HATES and DESPISES  all snakes! (Some of my teacher colleagues who know me thought I should get an award for taking my students to this and staying for the whole thing!)

I have been back working out full force  this week and all 3 runs so far have been great. I have strength trained twice and am feeling pleasantly tired from a good effort!

I now have more than 100 followers and am almost at my 100th post!

BTW I may have to delete this image soon as I am feeling sick just looking at it even briefly!