Following Polaris: CATCH-UP

AHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Maybe I need to set myself a schedule on this blog too! Hmmm... How about Saturdays? With June and July being optional? Sounds good too me.

Notes for everyone:
I will be returning to teach in Kaktovik next year! I will be teaching the preschoolers once again but instead of interventions I will be teaching Kindergarten as well! I'm really excited about this because I'll have the exact same students (one of them is on the cusp of reading!!!), but I'm also nervous because Kindergarten! I've always been wary of the K-2 grades because if you mess up there the poor kids have to play catch-up through graduation.

My cat just keeps growing! I was looking at pictures and he definitely doesn't have the adorable baby-face he had just a few months ago!

I am getting better at dealing with a classroom crises. This week one kiddo had a meltdown, but I didn't freak out, even though it seemed like the entire school played witness. In the past I would've been nervous to have all those adults around. I've gotten so much more comfortable in dealing with it.

We can go outside for recess again! Ahhhhhh... those glorious 20 minutes of outdoor time. Preceded and anteceded by ten minutes of dressing and undressing but I digress...

Now some fun stuff:
Way, way, way back in January I spent a couple days in Anchorage and Fairbanks. Here are some pictures from that:

Meet monstro. The birds up here are twice the size of any Southern birds!

YES!!! Thank you for the savings!

It took me forever to figure out how to start my rental (first one ever).

Tourism. Dining. Combined.

A mountain view from our hotel room!

Went for dinner with the other teachers at Ivory Jack's... and this is the only picture I managed to take.

Here is a photo of myself with the magnificent snowpile that inhabited the school 'lot' for most of the winter. I think that it was just a few days later that they moved it. It was a bit shocking to go out the door and not see it there!

One of the other teachers got a SMART board for her classroom. I saw the custodians hauling it out to the trash and KNEW I needed to save it for a couple of weeks. It served as a theatre/store. But undoubtedly the best part of the entire experience was painting it! Haha, clean-up was actually easier that day because no one took out any other toys. They were all terribly disappointed when I finally had to throw it away, but something else was coming. Something that was probably the most exciting thing to happen in class all year...

Caterpillars! I decided to gamble $40 on the odds that caterpillars could survive being mailed to the ends of the earth... they were five days late but ALL the caterpillars lived! (There was one fatality in the chrysalis stage, but that is common.) The kids loved the caterpillars and had to bring them to gym and snack-time. My favorite though was that they read the caterpillars books about butterflies to inspire them. So cute!

This is my very cohesive bulletin board. I was so proud of it that I had to take pictures for you... then realize that part of the alphabet had fallen down.

We also did some of our first comparing and contrasting work to talk about the changes the caterpillars went through to become butterflies.

The students made baby pictures for the caterpillars. As you can see Frozen dominated the naming process! I was just going to name mine Eric but one of my girls pointed out that it sounds better with the whole name. Later the students helped me feed the butterflies fruit supplied by our wonderful cook.

Lots of other things have been happening of course. Including our pajama party where the class watched Frozen (they all love Frozen and the soundtrack I bought could easily be the best $20 worth of classroom money I have spent all year.) We also have begun being story writers... to varying degrees of hilarity. I end up getting eaten by monsters or blowing away in a blizzard in a fair number of stories.

Plenty has been going on outside of school as well. But all you want is cat pictures right???

Sonic loves the sun. He went a little bit insane when the sun finally started coming in the windows of our house. He rolls in sunny spots and pounces at sunny spots on the wall.

He also loves my laptop. He will chase the cursor from here to kingdom come! Earlier in the year I ordered cat food and cat litter. I ended up with almost exactly the right amount of food... but due to a series of mishaps I ended up with around 150 lbs. of cat litter! Unfortunately I never took a picture showing the full mountain of kitty litter. However, I've got this shot of Sonic sneaking a feast from the storage bucket. Alright, enough of my cat ;)

How about a walk on the lagoon?