Starfish Files: the beautiful love of a child

My students this year have continued to bless me often. The word darling suits many of them well. Here are two moments from the last couple of weeks that have brought tears to my eyes:

For Mother's Day cards this year, I didn't give my students very specific directions. I just opened up the construction paper drawer and made sure they spelled the word mother correctly. Oh, and if anyone wrote 'Your wonderful' I made them squeeze in the apostrophe and e, since that is my least favorite spelling error.

Mateo came up and asked if he could use some of the extra craft supplies in the back of the room. I was busy with a million other things, so I vaguely remember saying 'sure' and wondered what he was up to. This is what he created:

Something about the simplicity, the slant of the writing, and the ellipsis just kills me.

And then on the inside he wrote. . .

Came up with it all on his own. Used a simile. Attempted to use higher level vocabulary. Told his mom that he loves her. Such sweetness. What a gift to play even a tiny part in his creative process.

A few days later, I was laminating some student work and feeling pretty overwhelmed by the long list of things I needed to do before heading home. The papers I was sending through were just some cursive pages for my kids to color and keep as a reference for when they're practicing cursive- an art that I refuse to let die. It's actually a paper that I got in 3rd grade and you can see my signature in the lower left corner. =)

I happened to look down at Ashlynn's, and I noticed that she'd written a couple of notes on hers:

Jesus used my little 10 year-old friend to speak the beautiful truth of the Gospel to me in a moment when I needed to hear it. I love that on a random cursive assignment, the overflow of her heart was to preach to others ("God says he loves you!") and preach to herself ("God loves me!"). What an example to follow.