Kansas Day, Part 2

Yikes and yuck - I have a cold, again, or it's back, or something. I don't know, but it does not help that I did not sleep very late at all this morning. Do you think there's any chance this could just be a two day, weekend cold? Please??

Oh, on to something much more fun! If you read my last post, you know I'm from Kansas and next Tuesday is Kansas Day. If you want to read about part 1 activities, go here. 

I had been debating all day yesterday about what to do. Our state flower is the sunflower, and I just love to have the kids paint sunflowers. I show them some pictures and then have them draw and paint their own. But I just didn't know how I could find time this year. So I debated skipping math and doing it then. (I know, very naughty!) I was still debating at lunch time. I had recess duty and when I went out, the teacher that was on duty with the 4th graders said, ah, go for it. So I did.

First of all, I made all my little twittle bugs who didn't work during literacy centers, do some work. I had some grumpy children then. But I let them join us after about 4 minutes of probably the hardest work they had done all day. And I saw hardest because they got more done in 4 minutes than they did in 20 minutes when they were supposed to be doing it! Oh, whatever.

I did some delegating - yeah, me, sometimes a little hard for me to let go like that. Somebody else passed out papers, somebody else passed out paintbrushes, somebody else passed out palettes (paper plates for the paints :). I did take control of sharing the paints - I'm not a crazy woman! 

The saddest thing of all was I have a young man whose last day in my class was Friday and he didn't want to paint. Oh, pooh. I even offered to let him paint another Kansas symbol. But he just sat there and played with his erasers. 

For the rest of the afternoon, we had some grade level fun. In the past, our school has had a school wide behavior plan with a reward celebration thing each month.  This year, it has been moved (passed - ha) down to the grade levels and the teachers. So our 2nd grade team decided to focus on Kansas Day this month. We each planned a 20 minute activity and we rotated the kids to each class. One team member did a boys against girls game - I'm not sure exactly what. The other team member showed some video clips of Kansas symbols. And I made up a Bingo game. But I added a little twist. First of all, this is a pretty good site, I thought, for making Bingo cards and it's FREE! (Love that!!!) This Bingo card generator will make several (I made 25) Bingo cards and it puts all the words in random places. And it also gives you a word list. Yeah! 

So what did I do to make it a bit more challenging? I put the answers on the Bingo card. Such as buffalo, meadowlark, sunflower, 34th, 15th. Then I had a light bulb moment. I have a Smartboard, so I used the Random Chooser on that and I typed out the clues on it. Such as State Mammal, State Bird, State Flower, Admitted to the US, # in Land Size. When we were playing, I had one kid come up and push the select button and the Random Chooser would pick a clue, I'd read it and if most of them would know the answer, we'd all answer together - like on the State Mammal. But if most of them didn't know, I'd have kids raise their hand and somebody would tell the answer. Bingo winners got a dorky sticker. It was pretty fun for them and easy for me, so that's obviously a win-win.

I had something else of Great Importance to share, but now I can't remember what it was, so maybe it's importance wasn't really that great :)

Have a terrific weekend. I think mine will be spent clearing off DVR things. Like Downton Abby - please no spoilers, I'm about 2 weeks behind!

Sara