Free at last! Harlem Shake! Giveaways! And some dog news...

I'm so excited to be able to share that our state testing is done for the year! Now we can finally get back to normal teaching and learning! I told my kids that if we tried our best on the test I'd let them make a Harlem Shake video.

Here it is!

The kids had a blast. Yes, that is me in my motorcycle helmet, dancing horribly at the beginning. The kids insisted that I be the lone dancer at the beginning.

I'm excited to get back to school next week and get back to teaching the way I love to teach. These past three weeks or so haven't been normal. I've tried to squeeze in good stuff, but not like I normally can. I'm happy to get back to our normal math workshop mornings and our Westward Expansion simulation, and our reading workshop, etc. We've managed to keep reading through Wonder even during the testing this week. I had about 90% of the class in tears this week when we hit a certain event in the book. After we finished our final state test on Friday I gave the kids a choice between 10 minutes of extra recess or 10 minutes of extra Wonder...kids voted for Wonder!

Congrats to I'm Lovin Lit for winning my fifty follower giveaway! We're on our way to 100! I hope to do a much bigger giveaway when I reach that milestone! I hope you enjoy your 50 States I have, who has game!

On a sad/personal note...
For some reason my oldest German Shepherd, Barghest, got it into his head this week to pull his bottle of arthritis medicine down from the counter and completely destroy it and then ingest the whole bottle of pills. Strangely enough, he also ate an entire plastic sealed baklava, wrapper and all. Luckily, my in-laws came for a visit and discovered the mess he'd made of the bottle and called me at work. I rushed him to the vet to discover he'd eaten twice the lethal dose of pills. He's been on a 48 hour observed IV fluid cleanse. $1,200 that we don't have later...he's coming home tonight, supposedly fit as a fiddle. Apparently, the combination of him eating an entire baklava and my in-laws finding him a couple hours earlier than I would have is what saved his life. He's lucky we love him...he also has EPI (a weird dog condition that means he can't digest food without an expensive enzyme supplement) he's now officially the most expensive thing I've ever owned I think. Sigh...dogs.

Now, on brighter note, head on over to the wonderful Ideas by Jivey blog and enter her 300 followers giveaway!

http://ideasbyjivey.blogspot.com/p/300-follower-giveaway.html 

It looks like some great products are up for grabs!