Lucky Leprechauns

My example -- not nearly as awesome as the students' work!

For St. Patrick's Day, I wanted to have a project with a good message that could stay up through the middle of April. We are having the 100th anniversary of St. Mary School on April 14, and I wanted to have the third and fourth graders do something that could stay up on the walls for guests to see.  Because we hosted forensics last night, I thought they would be very cute to have up for visiting students to see. I found some ideas on Pinterest and combined them to come up with these gems! The pot of gold came from a wonderful blogger: The Teacher Wife. She has it available on her Teachers Pay Teachers store. I found a picture of these leprechauns made out of paper plates on Pinterest, but I don't know the source of the picture because the pin no longer goes to the website source of the picture! I asked the students to think about who is worth more than gold and wrote this prompt on the board: "______________________ is worth more than gold."  The students had to write acceptable responses before they could draw their pictures. I showed them an example I had made using my nephews (aren't they A-D-O-R-A-B-L-E?) The written part is shown above.Because my students are better drawers than I am, I just decided to use a picture for the example. They understood. I absolutely love how they turned out! Most of the students wanted to write about their whole families. Here are some highlights.

This student wins my award for favorite beard. I love how the curlies go all the way up the face. He was very proud of his side burns!

I really get a kick out of this one! He wrote about his mom and dad. Apparently his dad is a bull rider, and that is the uniform he wears to practice!

Banana-Rainbow Chip Cookies

Round two of cookies for my forensics volunteers found me on Pinterest searching through the large number of desserts I have pinned, but haven't yet made. There I cam across Banana-Rainbow Chip Cookies and thought they would be a ton of fun! I found this recipe on Betty Crocker which gave credit to Adam and Joanne Gallagher from Inspired Taste for this wonderful recipe. You need fewer ingredients than the lemonade cookies! I love using cake mixes to make cookies. It just makes things so much easier. For these cookies, you need confetti cake mix, instant banana pudding mix, vegetable oil, two eggs, and white chocolate chips. You mix all the ingredients together, then drop them by tablespoons onto parchment lined baking sheets. Next, bake them for 10 minutes at 350 degrees. The result is very soft and yummy! Thank you Betty Crocker!!   I can't wait for my volunteers to try them on Tuesday! 

Soft Lemonade Cookies

For as long as I can remember, Grandma Bohman has made these cookies that are called fruit slices. She makes three different varieties: orange, lime, and lemon. I am fairly ashamed to admit I never tried these wonderful slices of heaven until I was in my twenties and willing to try new things because lemon, lime, and orange just never seemed like the flavors a cookie should have. As a matter of fact, the only thing that changed my mind was Girl Scout Camp.

I worked at Camp Evelyn Girl Scout Camp for two of the most amazing summers of my life. One of the best things about the food there was the occasional dessert of Girl Scout Cookies! Imagine my disgust when the only option one night was of the lemon variety. Not wanting to be one of THOSE staff members who told my campers to try things they aren't comfortable with but won't do the same themselves, I decided to suck it up. The joke was on me, the cookies, as many of you probably know, are FABULOUS! This gave me the courage to finally taste the cookies my grandma makes, and I found myself to be the butt of yet another knee slapper. Which brings me to the point of this rant - I came to grips with my aversion to citrus fruit flavored dessert and now fully embrace the flavor they can bring. 

Don't they look scrumptious??

 When I was looking for cookie recipes to bring into school for the volunteers who will help me pull off the middle school forensics competition on Tuesday, I found the recipe for Soft Lemonade Cookies in the 1997 Taste of Home Annual Recipes Cookbook. You can also find the recipe at the taste of home website - http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/Soft-Lemonade-Cookies.

It is amazing what you can do with 6 ingredients! All you need is softened butter, sugar, eggs, flour, baking soda, and, frozen lemonade concentrate, thawed. First, cream 1 cup of butter and 1 cup sugar until they are evenly blended. Then add two eggs. In a separate bowl, combine the flour and baking soda. Once the eggs are blended in, slowly alternate between adding the flour mixture and 1/3 cup of lemonade concentrate. (I cannot lie, I added at least two tablespoons more of concentrate to the dough because I wanted them to be really lemon-y. After it is mixed well, drop rounded teaspoonfuls onto parchment lined cookie sheets and bake for 8 minutes at 400 degrees.

Once they are out of the oven, they need to cool for a bit before you add the last step. By a bit, I literally mean a minute. After about a minute, I swiftly pulled the parchment paper off the baking sheets onto my cupboard. Then I used my silicone pastry brush to brush the cookies with the remaining lemonade concentrate. Lastly, I sprinkled the cookies with some more sugar. I can't wait to try them once they have cooled some more! I hope they will like them on Tuesday!

Celebrating Dr. Seuss

Celebrating Dr. Seuss! 

Last week was an important week at school. Dr. Seuss's birthday is one of my favorite days! Teaching middle schoolers doesn't leave a lot of room for me to go all out, but I do try to incorporate something special into my day. I was really inspired this year by our Kindergarten teacher, who really took off with a week packed full of amazing activities.

 Wednesday was hat day. Students and staff could pay one dollar and be able to wear a hat to school. To the left you can see the hat brought by one of the fourth grade students. I made sure I put him in the back of the room that day! The money raised went to a charity called Caps 4 Kids.


Most years I use  a Dr. Seuss book in my lesson for Read Across America, however, this year, I wanted to try something new. During my language arts classes in the afternoon, I had each student get out a book to read. For the first part of class, they read their books.

Toward the middle of the reading time, I stopped and gave Dr. Seuss trivia giving students the chance to win one of these cute little guys!
I can't for the life of me find the blog where I originally found them, but I was so inspired when I found them, I went out to get the materials right away. You need creme filled chocolate sandwich cookies, white chocolate chips or almond bark, marshmallows, and red candy melts (such as those made by Wilton).

I melted the white chocolate and dipped the cookies the melted chocolate. As those were cooling, I melted the red candy melts. After you dip one end of a marshmallow in the melted candy, you should place the dipped end on top of a dipped cookie. I had to let the marshmallows cool for a little while, so it would be easier to dip the top of the marshmallow.

Technically, the Dr. Seuss hat has five stripes, so to be more accurate, I should have dipped the bottom of the cookie in the red candy as well. I did not, however, have enough of the candy melts for this to happen. I did experiment with a few of them, as you can see, but most of the hats had all white bottoms.

After the Dr. Seuss trivia time, I had them read their books for a bit longer. With ten minutes left of class, they got out their journals and wrote about what they had read. They have to write a journal entry every day, so they automatically had something to write about with this activity.

This activity worked best with the fifth and sixth graders. The seventh and eighth graders weren't as impressed with the trivia, or having to read for "that long without stopping."

Later in the afternoon, the entire school met in the cafeteria for hot chocolate and candy canes. Since the cafeteria is right next to the kindergarten room, I grabbed a Dr. Seuss book from her basket to read as they drank. I didn't really look at which book I had grabbed until I got back into the cafeteria: I had grabbed Oh Say, Can You Say? What a tongue twister!