It Finally Happened...

I'm sick.

I felt sick right before Hawaii, and overdosed on Vitamin C. I got better.

I felt sick right after Hawaii, and overdosed on Vitamin C. I got better.

I felt sick on Thursday morning, and overdosed on Vitamin C. I am still sick. Right in time for my very relaxing 2 week vacation. I literally just woke up because I couldn't go to sleep last night until like 3 o'clock.

Oh well, at least I have time to recuperate before having to teach 24 energy-sucking 4th graders!

Christmas Letters

My coach (I have to have a coach that comes and helps me once a week because according to the district, I'm a first year teacher) kicked me out of my classroom today so the kids could write me some letters for a Christmas present. Here are some of my favorites:

(written on a Christmas tree): "Mrs. Lee you are the Best Teacher of all in the school and I do dare say I have had a lot of Great ones. But I do say you are the best of all."

(written by a student who I have to get after pretty much all the time):
Mrs Lee
Rockin teacher
Super

Lee
Extra nice
Everyone loves you (I had to spell all the words right, otherwise you wouldn't know what it said...)

"Dear Mrs. Lee, I think you are the best teacher in the whole world! Thank you for all the things that you've taught us. I think that 4th grade is easyer than any other grade because you are such a fun teacher! Merry Christmas!"

(We are writing a persuasive letter to Santa for writing right now, and I gave an example and told my kids I wanted a Kindle for Christmas. I had to prove why I thought I deserved it):
"Dear Mrs. Lee, Hello. Ya know I think I will give you that Kindle you wanted. But guess what, this is Nate, not Santa...You relly deserve a Kindle because you are the best teacher in the whole wide world!"

HA!

I have a pretty good life!

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas...

After several unsuccessful attempts:

We finally got our Christmas tree up,

some presents wrapped,

our stockings hung with a fire blazing,

and some cute decorations put up!

(I painted these at our Relief Society Super Saturday. I know, I'm awesome!)

Sunday

Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, right? Not so when you are sunbeam teachers and you haven't been there for two weeks.

The kids were CRAZY. Literally CRAZY!!! We had a total of 8 kids there today and 6 of them had a total meltdown or something close to it. They were hyper, touching each other, going behind curtains, throwing chairs...yeah, Crazy!

I'm kind of mad about the whole situation. We have two sunbeam classes and they stacked our class with all of the boys that are real behavior problems. (6 out of the 8 today were boys...) If you look at the other sunbeam class, there were four there today, three girls, one boy. And, they were perfect.

You might say that it's us and we aren't good at managing these kids and if someone else was in our position they could do better. Sometimes, I like to take the blame for things like this. Not this time. If you look at the other class, they have a substitute almost every week. Different teachers every week. And they are perfect every week. It's not a matter of who's teaching, it's a matter of what kind of kids they are and who they are surrounded by. 6 boys who are the same age, best friends, and are only 4...not a good combination. I don't care who the teacher is. The primary presidency should know this and spread out the tough kids and the reverent kids. That way it's only 3 hard ones instead of 6. That's a huge difference.

I feel like they (the primary presidency) think that we can handle hard kids because I'm a teacher, but I really don't think that is fair. Yes, I may have more experience with that many kids at the same age, but that doesn't mean we can handle 6 boys wreaking havoc!

Unfortunately, I think it will be just as bad next year. We had a Sunbeam Orientation on Wednesday so that the new set of kids could meet their teachers, and we had to do like a 5 minute lesson so they knew what it was like to be in Sunbeams. We had 5 there, the other class...3. We definitely had all of the crazy kids again. The other kids were angelic the whole time. I could only say that one of our kids behaved that night.

Needless to say, I'm not looking forward to the new year. In fact, I am seriously considering sending an email to the primary president and telling her we think it's a good idea to call another set of Sunbeam teachers. It's really not fair how this has played out.