KGHS Prom 2017

Did I mention that Jason is in love with Abby and refers to her as his girlfriend?

 My baby boy Garrett headed off to prom last night with his gorgeous girlfriend Abby Elia.  What a handsome young man! I cannot believe that he will be 17 in just a couple of weeks!  *mind blown*
The prom is for juniors and seniors at KGHS.  Garrett and Abby started their afternoon with lots of pictures, then met up with friends Markal/Rachel and Kyle/Morgan for dinner.  I am proud to announce that they took my suggestion of going to the Sedona Tap House, a new-ish steakhouse in downtown Fredericksburg.  The place is slammed every night of the week, so Abby made reservations for the group a couple of weeks ago.  Then it was off to the prom being held at the Old Silk Mill near Caroline Street.  The mill was built in 1889 and was literally a silk mill for years.  It's part of the property of the Wakefield Inn which was once the 3rd largest hotel on the east coast.  Apparently it was quite the spot to stop for families who traveled from Maine to Florida on Rt. 1 for vacation.  

 The KGHS prom committee arranged an after prom party at SkyZone indoor trampoline park for 11 PM - 3 AM but Garrett and friends declined.  Instead, they headed back to Chris's house for a bonfire and general shenanigans.  

Easter Fun!

 After a full week of driving Garrett, Caroline and friends to various college tours around the state, I definitely wanted to keep my Easter low-key.  Luckily, we get the Monday after Easter off from school, so we headed over to Maryland to visit with Tim's parents and didn't have to worry about rushing back to get ready for a full school/work week.  Garrett and Caroline were MIA this year (they missed the festivities because of a return trip from a camping weekend), so it was just the 6 of us eating turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, peas, broccoli, and Glen Miller salad (a whipped cream/pineapple Jello concoction that Tim is in love with).  
After eating, we headed outside to play with new bubble wands, and then headed back in for an indoor Easter egg hunt.  The pollen is so bad right now that no one wanted to be outside while the kids looked for eggs!

The Easter bunny kept it simple this year with just a few different candies, a new baby doll for Emily, and a new Nerf gun for Jason.

The indoor egg hunt!

Grandpa was a tricky hider!  We found eggs behind the blinds, under seat cushions, pretty much everywhere that a 4 year old wouldn't look ;)

Success!

Love the pouty face in this pic!

Emily was always amazed when her efforts actually produced sizable bubbles!

National Poetry Month: Blackout Poetry!

 April is National Poetry Month and our school year is winding down fast!  (Students are out on May 23rd and teachers stay til May 25).  I need to leave a couple of weeks for my inventory at the end of the school year (and to chase down all of those late books!) so this past week and next week will be my last lesson with the students.  I'll see them the week of April 24th for their final checkout time! 
So I wanted to do a fun activity with them for poetry month.  I have a bunch of old books that I've discarded from our collection and many of the books are falling apart (broken bindings, whole sections of pages falling out, etc.).  I took the most pitiful of the books and carefully cut out the pages.  We used these pages for blackout poetry!  
What is blackout poetry you ask?  Well, I read about this great lesson on Scholastic's website and based on activity on that information.  The student chooses words from the book page that "call" to them.  They select "connecting words" that hold their selected words together.  The poems usually end up being free verse, short phrases and random themes.  The poems almost never have anything to do with what the author was actually writing about!  In fact, we instructed the students to only scan the page for anchor words, not to actually read the page for a plot summary or theme.
To say that the kids loved it would be the understatement of the year!  They were OBSESSED with it!  Whole groups were coming back to the library during lunch to ask for extra book pages and begging to stay to make more poems!  
Our school is pretty great about supplying the teachers with things they need in their classrooms, but this activity required more Sharpies than one teacher could get in their paws, so a trip to Costco was needed.  I bought a giant pack of black Sharpies (25) and a giant pack of colored Sharpies (25) and spent less than $20 for both.  The kids also used colored pencils for shading in large areas or for mixing colors.
As I started to take pictures of some great examples for posterity, I realized that almost all of the poem pages had turned out amazingly well.  There were only a couple of pages that showed a real lack of effort (mostly from a couple of kids that didn't want to be there in the first place).  Even my most reluctant students dived right into this activity and worked silently.  We didn't even require them to be silent, they were just so focused!  The English teacher and I also told each class that we wouldn't "approve" a poem or design before the student proceeded with their work;  poems are highly individual and personal.  Each student needed to create work that they were proud of and that showed off their skills.