February vacation has come and (almost) gone, and I'm just now getting to last week's blog post! It feels like a really long time ago that we came back from the weekend to a Monday with....no power! It was quite the experience. It was mildly overwhelming to think on my feet and completely revamp my poetry lesson for the day. It's crazy to think about how much we rely on electricity, from documents on Google Drive to the SMARTBoard to the copy machine. We ended up playing a game in teams centered around the poet's message. The kids showed so much flexibility and we ended up having a great time. (Check out the pictures below, along with some spectacularly neat handwriting by Miss Isadora.) Another fun-filled power outage happened later in the week, but we got around that one too. We spent a lot of time on writing about poetry this week. We analyzed the poem "Ode to Family Photographs" by Gary Soto and uncovered what we thought was the poet's message. We then planned and wrote about the message, proving it with evidence from the poem. We'll do another writing about a poem on the Monday we get back from break and then we have our poetry test on Tuesday. I'm super excited for our field trip at the end of the week too!

Tommy and Amanda were our Bucket Fillers of the week. Both students have done a really nice job in our poetry unit. Tommy's improvement throughout the course of the unit made me so proud. He went from being unsure of what a poet's message is to figuring out the message of some super difficult poems. Amanda also impressed me with her ability to analyze poetry. In addition, she's been writing poems galore and really making the most of her poetry notebook. Nice job you two!