Leprechaun Madness - Lots of Pictures!

Today is an inservice/work time day for teachers and next week is Spring Break. That means any St. Patrick's Day celebrations had to be done this week instead of next!

We started out telling the students that last year a leprechaun reeked havoc on the third grade. He destroyed our classroom in his search for gold! This definitely got the students' attention. We designed traps to catch the leprechaun and had a STEM-related discussion about how they intended on catching the little rascal.

We set the traps on Wednesday evening, I locked our classroom door on the way out so that no one could mess with them. On Thursday morning, our classrooms were a disaster! We checked each trap, but the slippery little leprechaun escaped us again!

The clean up process begins...

Third Grade Bracketologists

Today we became bracketologists! Because the first (play-in), second, and third rounds of the NCAA tournament were over our Spring Break, we created our brackets today. Not sure any of them would have picked the upsets that occurred, but hopefully those are over (at least for this Jayhawk fan!).

The students filled out their brackets and I posted them in the classroom. During the afternoon, many of the students walked over when they had time and check out what teams their classmates had chosen. Later this week, we will add some geography to the mix and find the cities where the universities are as well as the cities where the games are held.

I Believe That We Will Win!

Our students start their Kansas State Assessment tomorrow, so we as a grade level and staff (along with the rest of the school!) pumped them up!! Out theme this year is

MOONLIGHT SOCCER STARS: I BELIEVE THAT WE WILL WIN!!

All the 3rd and 4th graders started the assembly by running through the game tunnel our district high school uses for games.

Then, we were treated to the stars of the high school soccer teams. Let me tell you, they know some awesome tricks!

Our principal donned a goalie uniform and had third & fourth teachers try to make a goal. After we each tried, we all went at once!

We learned the Sporting KC chant: I Believe That We Will Win and practiced it until we were blowing the roof off the gym!! My hubby was our wonderful drummer for the chant.

Oh, and we had a Harlem shake by the K-2 teachers!

Here's a pic with my outstanding 3rd grade team!

Spring Break Bucket List

I am linking up with Brigid's Daily Lesson Log to write my Spring Break Bucket List!

1. Organize the basement! It is a pit of disarray and needs to be tackled. Our town has a city wide garage sale the first weekend in May and I need to sort through the madness.
2. Sleep in!! Should that have been first?!
3. Get mentally prepared for assessments. We start Kansas State Assessments the Tuesday we return to school. The kids are prepared academically, we just need to calm their fears of their first state assessment.
4. Catch up on blogging and reading blogs
5. Make some delicious Pinterest meals & desserts!
6. Find awesome resources through TeachersPayTeachers for our fourth quarter indicators. Gotta get those 3rd graders ready for fourth grade and for the coming Common Core next year!

Lucky Lennox the Leprechaun

My students are now on Spring Break, so we had a little fun last week! On Tuesday, we came in to see a green mess and a note from Lennox, the Lucky Leprechaun. The note read "I can smell your GOLD, where is it at? I am just a wee bit short. I guess I'll have to keep looking. Write me back!"

 

 We discussed the best way to trap a leprechaun over the next two days. Each of my students drew a trap. Many of the traps involved a person (read: me) pulling a string to pull the trap on the leprechaun. After I told them that I prefer to sleep in my own bed and not at school, we had to narrow down the list. We had a top five to vote and choose from. The below trap is the one that won. There are two plastic drawers with a (testing) tshirt & pillow draped across the top. Fools' gold is under the tshirt/pillow. The leprechaun would go in for the gold and get trapped under the tshirt/pillow.

 The student who drew the winning trap built it with the help of a few classmates. You can see that they added some greenery and gold coins to lure in Lennox.

 Sadly, we did not catch Lennox, he is a slippery leprechaun. And he was unhappy we tried to trap him! This is what we walked into on Thursday morning!

 

 

 (view from my desk)

 

I didn't get a photo of this, but Lennox did leave each student a chocolate gold coin as well as a snap-glow bracelet. So after the room was picked up, we turned out the lights and had a glow stick party! The kids loved it. It was a great send of to spring break!

As our snack for the day, we had Lucky Charms cereal. The students sorted the marshmallows before they enjoyed the yummy snack!