Santa Clause Came!

Ok, he didn't.  It's October.  But my kids were convinced.  Everything was about Santa today for some reason.  I didn't want to tell them that they still had over 2 months until he made an appearance.

We received our pen pal letters today.  I have an aunt who teaches second grade in California and we decided a few years back to have our classes be pen pals throughout the year.  It's so awesome and the kids love it.

We got our first set today and I hadn't mentioned it to my student at all.  So I showed them the package that it came in (which my aunt always decorates and I forgot to take a picture of!) and asked them what they thought was in it.

"Letters from Santa Claus!"

Um.  Nope.  Sorry kid.
And since when does Santa write letter to children?  I thought it was the other way around?

Anyway, we moved on and started writing our letters.

I created this poster to help my students understand how to set up a letter:

Get it here for free!

While we were writing our pen pal letters, a large box was delivered to my classroom:

This box with such a pretty bow, prompted students to shout, you guessed it, "Santa Clause came!"

Nope.  Sorry kids.  That's a birthday present for Mrs. S.  

This is what the inside of the box looked like:

Yummy cupcakes!  My brother dropped off 6 of my favorite flavor for me and my friends.  He is a pastry chef and he works for a company called Sweet Indulgence.  Yeah, he makes cupcakes and candy for a living, how awesome is that??  Check them out - they make ahh-maazing stuff!  My IPhone photo does not do it justice!

Sooo, 2 Santa Clause shout-outs in one day?  It's going to be a long two months till Christmas!

And now I have blog news.  Every once in a while I check my blog stats.  I am always curious which posts get the most attention and where my readers are coming from.  This helps me become a better blogger!

More often than not, my readers come from Pinterest.  Today, however, a lot were coming from this site:

I had never heard of it before, so I checked it out.  I then realized that they did a whole blog post on one of the posts I had written - so cool!  Check it out here.  It is my most popular post and it is about using dancing to teach subtraction.