Positive Fridays - Week of March 31st, 2014

I was happy to be back to work after a great start to Spring Break for my birthday where I went to 3 days of country music concerts.  It was so much fun seeing Keith Urban, Toby Keith, Sarah Darling, Joe Nichols, Rodney Atkins, The Band Perry, JT Hodges, Neon Summer, and more!  Toward the end of spring break I ended up at the doctors twice and found out I have a Kidney Stone.  Your thoughts and prayers would be appreciated!  Enough of the unfortunate news, let's get to the positives!

It was great to be back with such a wonderful faculty and students.  My students really shined this for me!

• One child who was having a rough day raised his hand and said Mr. Hopkins, you're the best teacher.  I think you should be the teacher of the year!  How sweet is that?  That is bucket filling at its finest!
• They worked on making some wonderful bunnies and wrote about why they are a lucky bunny.  They did such an amazing job, I'll try to get pictures and try to find sometime to get that up on here for everyone to see how cute they turned out!
• They worked so hard in groups together doing an Open Picture Sort with cards.  They had to figure out the beginning sounds and then group them together and write the sound on each card.  I challenged my Kindergarten children and had both long and short u.  Surprisingly the group that had low/average children (all in my 2 intervention groups) was the group who figured out the long and short u as well as the rest!  
• I started doing DRAs on my students again and I am so pleased that 2 of my girls have jumped considerably.  In fact so much that I need to hear them read again!  One has jumped at least 2 levels and the other 3!  Our goal is to read a level 6 at the end of the year and they read a 4 independently!  I was so excited and so were they!  The smiles on their faces told it all.
• We said goodbye to an intern I've had for awhile.  She is a freshman in college and worked so well with the children, always asking me what else can she do to help me or the children.  This wonderful lady is going to be amazing teacher.  She wrote me such a sweet card thanking me for everything and said she got some great classroom management tips and classroom ideas.  I also helped her see that she truly does still want to be a Kindergarten teacher.  I'm glad I could influence a future teacher!

Anyone have any group student success stories?  Thanks for hoppin' by Hopkins' Hoppin' Happenings.  Keep on smiling!