Onward to the New Year!

The children came back today for their first day of 2015 and it went so well! It was a great morning with a lot of self-directed work. Several children helped me put away the small mountain of laundry we had washed before break, while the rest quickly settled back in to some of their favorite work activities.

C tagged along with me for a little bit before asking, "Eggs, teacher Alex." Lucky him he got the very last hardboilded egg and proceeded to spend the next half-hour peeling and cutting it, happily engaged in getting himself a snack.

W went through is usual repertoire of washing the windows, sweeping off the tables, trying to sweep the carpet, watering the plants; all the usual classroom maintenance stuff that he likes to do. Then it was back to the tried and true globes. I'm really hoping to get the world puzzle map soon so I can introduce it to him since he seems so interested in the globe. Then I'll be able to judge whether he actually likes the globe itself, or is just taking it out because it's easy ;)

Our lovely new flower arranging stand
(thanks dad!)

C and S did fetching with the new solar system cards, I helped them out with learning the names and spawned interest in some other children to learn some new vocabulary as well.

Meanwhile M went from work to work to work, I couldn't even keep track of what she was doing other than to note that whatever she took out she put back properly and seemed to be concentrating on while she had it out. My friends, those are the types of children you dream about having in your classroom. I need to remember to mention how great she is at keeping engaged during the next parent teacher conference.

At the end of the day they were all tickled silly by the amount of beads we had to put on our string to catch up for all the days we had been gone. That was it, the end of our day. It was like they'd never left...please tell me that tomorrow's going to go off just as well...please?