If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it (and Friday Freebie!)

Totally not what my blog post was going to be today....

I live in Connecticut, you know where the world is ending.... in case you didn't know it's our first hurricane ever in history. Here's a friend's picture from Facebook of the water aisle at Stop and Shop.

The town next to use has their first kid day of school Monday- already cancelled. Our PD for Monday is cancelled at least in the morning, because the speaker can't fly in because his flight is ALREADY cancelled. If we have power we'll have PD, but we won't there are 872839929 trees in my town...we won't have power. I've already packed an evacuation bag because we are less than a 1/2 mile from the coast and one for the puppies too!

So here is my post/thought/tiny complaint.... as a teacher, I feel compelled to tell everyone to calm down. Is that not what we do as a teacher?

We say "Boys and Girls yes the fire alarm is going off but we need to be civil little adults and walk out of the building in an orderly fashion." Not "Pannnniiicccc, RUNNNNNN, AHHHHHH, DISASTER!!!!!"

How do we raise children to be independent thinkers, to be calm and collective when things go wrong and then when we all become adults we throw the rule book out the window and panic.

My Step Dad is the fire chief and fire marshall in our town, I went down to help him out in the office today because as you can imagine the phone is ringing off the hook with people. But since we are having this hurricane any semblance of common sense has gone out the window...i.e. Can I put my propane gas grill in my house during the hurricane.... as my co teacher Chris would say ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THAT?????

I am all for being prepared. HELLO I'M A TEACHER!!! I'm all for giving people the information they need to make their own wise decisions. But the crazy hype, the lack of thinking, it makes me feel we failed our fire drill instruction as teachers.

So my advice is this. Don't be dumb. Be ready. Be prepared and as my friend Diana said, "we are New Englanders put on your big girl pants and deal with it." We've been here before and we'll be ok, we will endure.

And now on to the fun stuff, my Friday Freebie. (sorry I can't imbed it in here....)

Birthdays! Aren't they great? I love to do something meaningful that kids can look back at and say "Oh look how cute my friends were". So my freebie is my birthday book pages. Every child gets a birthday book (even the summer kids, we do them in June). Every child gets a birthday book page, they fill in the picture box and write about their gift. Even though this is published work I generally do not correct the misspellings. I hope that one day they can look back and see how far they've come.

The second page is for the birthday boy or girl. I borrowed this idea from the Math Stations book I just got. The student picks out a person/character/friend etc. we will Google or email to find out the person's age (i.e. if it's Mom). They then fill out the page and write how many tens and ones that persons age is. I then compile this in 3 ring binder that we add to threw out the year and keep in our classroom library!

To everyone on the East Coast.... be smart! To everyone else out there, send good thoughts our way we could surely use them!