Elf on the Shelf

Our Elf on the Shelf arrived yesterday - wayyyy late! I showed my students the box with the book and elf inside, but left it on the table overnight. When we got to school, they found him fishing in our classroom fish tank!

I read the book out loud this morning and we watched the movie this afternoon. The kids say that he fell off to the side of the tank near the pencil sharpener during indoor recess, but when I brought them back to class after lunch, he was sitting back up there! We're going to use Create a Graph to vote on our favorite names tomorrow. My personal favorites are Poppy (my deceased grandfather) and Elvis (my childhood dog). I mean, come on! Elvis the Elf does have a nice ring to it. 

It was a busy day, and our behavior was much better yesterday and today, so students will have tomorrow to earn their ticket aboard The Polar Express on Friday (check the blog tomorrow to see what we'll be doing!) They worked so hard today and finished everything I had planned, even though I didn't start teaching them until about 10:30 because we had special and the second holiday concert of the week. I promised I'd post our Class Dojo results after days 2 and 3, so here they are: 

I am loving the fact that less students are coming in late, especially from lunch, and more students are writing in their reading logs. We're looking for 100% for each of those categories, plus completing homework and journal each day.

We also completed our Light the Night writing piece. Students had to choose a holiday that they celebrate (such as Diwali, Ramadaan, birthday, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, etc.) and write about it. It was interesting to see kids trying to write about holidays they either don't truly celebrate or trying to figure out the purpose of the lights to celebrate the holiday. That, to me, means we've kind of lost sight of the reasons to celebrate the season... Anyway, here's the bulletin board (I didn't have time to make it very pretty) and a couple of samples: