Rocks!

Hey everyone!!  Hope you are all having an amazing summer!  I am back after a long hiatus and ready to start blogging again!  We added a new addition to our little family back in April.

Along with blogging about my classroom, I am also going to share how I am balancing being a mom of 2 with being a teacher.  My hopes are to share parenting, organizing/time management ideas, and classroom ideas!

In our area, and I'm sure in other areas as well, people are painting and then leaving rocks in random places around town for others to discover.  Basically, you paint a rock and hide it somewhere for someone to find.  If you find a rock, you can keep it and add it to your collection.  Then you would paint another rock to hide.  If you don't want to keep it, you can re-hide it.  The point of it is to spread creativity and kindness.  Over the last couple of months, I've seen posts about it on Facebook.  They even have Facebook groups dedicated to this new trend.  I've been interested in it, but we never really searched for any.  The other day when we were out shopping at Aldi, I was getting ready to put a quarter in to get my shopping cart.  Right on the ledge was this adorable rock!

My phone was dead, so I didn't get to take a picture until we brought it home and charged my phone 𝨒𝨓🙍.  I pointed it out to my daughter, and she was SO thrilled that we found one.  It sparked that excitement in her, in she was so eager to search for more.  We decided to keep it and paint a new rock.

She wanted to paint a peace sign on hers.  Then we went to a local park and hid it for another person to find it.  Now, we are on the lookout for more rocks.  I absolutely love this idea and can't wait to paint more to hide.  This got me thinking of a super cute idea for my classroom.  Since summer vacation is coming to an end in a couple of weeks, I am really starting to get ideas together and plan.

Since my classroom has small groups throughout the day, each group will get a little piece of construction paper to decorate.  They can decorate it however they want, but obviously appropriate.  They will also write a special message like "you rock!".  Then they can "hide" it somewhere in the classroom for the next group to find when they come in.  We will keep going until all the groups have found a special message.  We can then hang them up in the classroom once all the groups get their special message.  I love this idea, because I feel it is SO important to teach the whole student and not just academics.  This activity will let the students be creative and spread kindness and happiness to other students.  They will also get a chance to work together to create something.  It's not only wonderful for my students with social goals, but it's a perfect reminder for every student to spread kindness.  I can't wait to try this idea and post pictures!

I am super excited for this school year!  It is going to be a fantastic one!

Ciao!