3rd Grade Valentines

On Friday I found out that it is fantastic to be a teacher at Valentine's Day. I had heard rumors that in my school, V-Day is bigger than Christmas. One teacher told me about the time a student gave her lingerie as a gift. I wasn't sure what to expect going into it on Friday.

It was interesting. We don't have time to have parties, so my kids only got to exchange Valentines during our 10 minutes of recess, but it still resulted in two kids declaring it "the best Valentine's Day ever!!!"

And as for me? I walked around with an interesting assortment of "gifts":

-A giant box of chocolates
-A medium box of chocolates
-A small box of chocolate
-A delicious bag of chocolate
-Delta cookies (those ones that you get on your flight in coach...)
-Roses from 2 kids (one came with a vase and ribbon)
-Mary Kay lipstick
-Peach-scented antibacterial hand lotion
-A chocolate rose
-4 stuffed animals
-Two Valentine's Day pencils
-Two lollipops
-An origami heart
-A dozen or so Jonas Brothers/High School Musical/other teeny bopper Valentine's Day cards

And my favorite, a glass rose, which looks something like this:


It's hard to imagine, but it looks even more awesome in real life.

I don't know what to do with this stuff (minus the chocolate...I've been eating it all morning...)

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

I have a quick story to tell from work today. Maybe it's not actually funny to the general population, but if you happen to be a 3rd grade teacher you might like it.

On with the story.

In math, we're wrapping up division this week and are practicing how to divide when there's a remainder. So I gave my kids this problem:

There are 46 students in Ms. Gross' and Mrs. Peter's classes. We want to go on a field trip, and each bus can hold 20 students. How many buses will we need?

I wanted my kids to realize that we would need three buses, because we couldn't (despite wanting to...) leave 6 students behind.

So one of my kids raised her hand and said we would need three buses and gave a great explanation. But then a clever boy with a good sense of humor raised his hand and said,

"But Ms. Gross, maybe we should just get a van instead."