Dead Drops

In one of my classrooms I have a dead letter box (inside the board eraser) for passing fun "secret" messages between classes. Today I found two unsigned notes inside:

At least my board game is fun for someone, although apparently not for the game.

Board Games and Poop Mountain

This year I hit gold with a great new way to play games with my students. I call it the Board Game...because, you know, it's on the board.



If you get the hamster you can ride it to my house (complete with William Tell Overture sound effects). The spiders go to the spider web. If you get the angry teacher at the end, you have to sit in the baby chair at the beginning. If you land on the toilet you get flushed out to the sea, where a hungry shark is waiting (accompanied by the Jaws theme). Butterflies go to the flower. The egg goes to the chicken and the fried chicken goes there, too. The ghost goes to the graveyard. I forget now what the candy does. Every time we play it's different!

All the crazy drawings below it are from when I taught my kindergarten class basic prepositions. It's way more fun to talk about dinosaurs and pigs wearing butterfly necklaces than to make boring sentences like "I sit next to so-and-so," right? Yeah, I thought so, too.

My 6-year-old class really enjoys calling everything they see a poop-something (poop-fish, poop-pizza, poop-zombie (either poop-monster or poop-zombie is visible in this picture), poop-mountain, etc.). So that's Poop Mountain at the bottom there, and I drew on a trail so we can practice spelling our phonics word "hike."

Sometimes teaching can be so much fun!

Merry Christmas!

My Other Job

You may have noticed that I haven't posted very often for a long, long time.  That's because I've been spending all of my free time on my second job: I'm now a published author!

My first book: The Inventor's Slave

 My first book was released in May, but it has a lot of violence, which might not be appealing to a lot of readers of this blog, so I didn't post about it here.

My second book: Hunger Is the Best Sauce

 
My second book, however, just came out today, and you can get the e-book for free here on Black Friday, November 25th, 2016, if you're interested.

If you read either book, I would love it if you'd take a moment to leave an honest review.

In the meantime, happy Thanksgiving!

And the Winner of This Month's Funniest Test Answer Awards Is...

"I want it looking its best on show day!"

When Normal Knives Just Don't Cut It

"I swear it's not a weapon, officer - I just use it to cut watermelon!"

Rooftop

Today during my break I went up to the roof of a new building in the city. The peace and quiet was amazing, and the heat and sun were great. Here's a glimpse of the great view:



I think I'll go up there again sometime.