Where Children Sleep By James Mollison

Tonight as I roamed around the blog world, passing time waiting to move, losing my mind for tomorrow to come, I found this website. Don't get me wrong, as a family we had a great weekend, we're done packing, we had a wonderfully funny family Sunday dinner with the teens trying to out-do each other with jokes, some crossing that fine line into adult humor :( But, I laughed so hard tonight my head is pounding! Hubby works the midnight shift and I always miss him terribly the minute he walks out the door ~ not too shabby for being married for 7 1/2 years! Usually when he leaves I spend a few minutes on the computer,  I don't know how I found this site, don't remember what I clicked, but now I can't stop thinking about it and thought other teachers might like to see it too. My first principal use to drive us around town in a big, yellow school bus during pre-planning. She wanted us to see the difference between the "haves" and the "have-nots" in our school and BOY, OH, BOY did we have extremes. Million dollar waterfront homes to single wide trailers with no electricity. It has stuck with me my entire career! I usually spend the first two weeks of school driving home by different routes each night so I can see where all my students come from, but that's a blog for another night....
So anyhooooo, often God sends us messages in the most unusual ways, as frustrated as I am about closing on my house, how everything has gone wrong and how I can't wait to move, my life is nowhere near as bad as many of the children in this book. Looking at the sampling of children in this book will make most of you thankful for the life you were born into! The pictures go from
A  L  L
 to N  O  T  H  I  N  G
When you look at each child's portrait, look at their eyes, this photographer is amazing.

My Picture
This is me in Orlando in 5th grade!
I'm the stylish one posing on the right hand side, hahahahaha! Apparently no one had told me yet about bangs for my big ole' forehead {fivehead} and contacts to replace the coke bottle rimmed glasses!  Also notice the beautiful wallpaper of Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson & the 1970's brown "blinds" on my window! The other two kids are family friends that we vacationed with almost every weekend. We use to all live near each other in Coral Springs and when my family moved to Orlando, we traveled up and down the east coast of Florida meeting up with their family and vacationing together. I thought all kids spent every weekend in hotels on different beaches and Walt Disney World  ~ I now appreciate the fact that I had an amazing childhood!
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Easy Independent Dice Game for Addition or Multiplication


Now that we've started "teaming" at school, my math class is starting to roll! Seriously, we are rolling dice like crazy! AND. THEY. ♥LOVE. IT!
My math block looks like this:
15 mins: Mini-lesson of the day then 3 rotations 15 mins. each,
Teacher: Small group lesson, 6 students
Group Work: children are working on the mini-lesson of the day, 6 students
Game/Center: children are working on basic skills with a hands-on game or activity, 6 children

So this week we started with a simple dice game:
Children work in pairs with three dice.
They each have a turn rolling the three dice,
then writing down the simple addition problem { 6+5+1=}
The winner is the child who has the highest score for those two problems.
They make a tally chart {which is part of this week's graphing skills}
and the winner of the game is whoever gets to 12 points first.
Easy, high-interest and just enough to keep them engaged for the 15 minutes.

I did start Monday with one of Ron Clark's Essential 55: When you win, do not brag; when you lose, do not show anger. We practiced a few rounds of "Good Game!" "Way to go!" "That was fun!" and it really paid off! So far, so good, no ugly words in our room and I was able to really get to know my new boys and girls uninterrupted while working with them in small groups.

But today was the very, best part! Our 1/2 day/early dismissal day is now 1 hour longer & our school was having a small problem with the Pizza Fundraiser, so I passed out paper and told them they could draw. {I rarely let them do this, I only save it for EMERGENCIES, which today was!!!} they started asking for the dice! :) Then some of them asked if they could MULTIPLY the numbers instead of add! We had tears over no pizza, we had tears over panicking about how they get home, we had tears about going to a math workshop {opppps, that would be me!} but we also had math! Overall, it was a great day!
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