Celebrate: Graduations, Conversations, Flowers, and Spring Cleaning!

Ruth Ayres, over at Ruth Ayres Writes encourages us to take a look back at the previous seven days and celebrate the good things that have happened. Want to read more celebrations? Head on over to her blog.

I have one really big thing to celebrate, my daughter graduated from college! Warning: to those of you not at this stage yet, the four years of college go faster than the four years of high school. 

The big day was made even better because our friend Luc (on the far left) happened to be in the United States and could join us. Luc originally come into our home through a French exchange program, he quickly became part of the family and we've had many visits together.

The work week was quiet compared to most, but still full of celebratory moments. I had four encouraging conversations with my fourth graders. I showed each class the I Have A Dream poetry blog post. We explored the effectiveness of the visual messages. The students and I talked about word placement, color choice, word choice, and layout. These types of conversations make me happy.  I look forward to continuing this work with them in fifth grade.

Local author and illustrator Claire Nivola visited with my fifth graders. I am interested in the types of questions that students are asking authors and illustrators. The questions they asked made me proud. We didn't prearrange any questions for this visit and we didn't need to, their questions were thoughtful and demonstrated their interests.  Claire's responses were filled with just the right amount of information. 

Inspired by a question during the #sharpschu twitter chat, I read The Watermelon Seed by Greg Pizzoli. The book won the Geisel Award this year. I asked the students the question that had been asked of us, "What would Theodore Seuss Geisel like about this book?" The second graders were eager to take on this challenge and responded with many of the same things shared during the chat. They thought he would like the humor, the color choice, the expressions on the crocodile's face, the melodrama, and the fact that the story would continue (that another watermelon seed would be swallowed). I agree!

My week was full of after school meetings, so I wasn't able to walk to school until Friday. I think mother nature knew that I longed for beautiful things to see because I could barely make it a block without having to stop and take a picture.  

Oh, and I spent some time cleaning and tidying in my library! It feels good to come into the last twenty days of school this way.

Happy Saturday!