Five for Friday

I happened upon a fun weekly linky hosted by Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching, and it's called Five for Friday.  Bloggers can share five items about their day or week.  Here are mine:

1. I've been dealing with an inoperable garage door for a couple of days, and my friend's husband came to the rescue this morning!  He checked it out and when I pulled into the driveway after school and hit the button - wala(is that how you spell it?) - the door opened as usual.  A big dent in my checkbook was diverted! I still plan to give him a gift card to a sporting goods store or something guyish like that.

2. We had an intruder drill this afternoon.  The staff had been notified about it before the break, but I had forgotten.  The secretary came on the loudspeaker and said there was an emergency situation in the building, and everyone should go to their safe spots.  The kids were freaked, and kept asking me if it was real.  The look on some of their faces was alarming.  I told them I was pretty sure it was a practice drill but it did seem like we sat in the corner in the dark for a long time.  Luckily they bounced back afterwards and it didn't seem to affect the rest of the day.

3. The third and fourth graders at my school have something called Bobcatfest (our mascot is a bobcat) every Friday afternoon.  We get together for different activities and guest speakers, and today we had board game day.  I think many of the students had received games for Christmas.  Anyway, one of the girls brought this:

4. We do Words Their Way for spelling and word work, and I decided to reassess my third graders this week.  I scored the assessments, and every one of my 27 students had improved their scores from the first assessment in September - yay! 

5. We are working on elapsed time in math.  It is such a challenging concept.  We use Math Expressions, and they suggest drawing time lines which seems to help.  Any suggestions for helping those that are really struggling?