Starfish Files: Poppins, Paper, and Puzzlers

I had a really lovely day with my students today, and I am extra thankful for it because the beginning of the week was a little rough. Let's just say that a few of my students know how to really push my buttons, and we're at that extreme button pushing time of the school year. But, I've been asking people to pray for extra patience and wisdom for me, and I saw the Lord provide that today. The fun day we had today reminded me of the other lovely things that have been going on (why do only the negative parts of my day stand out sometimes? Lame!), so for this edition of the Starfish Files, here are some recent highlights:

• We finished state testing (woo hoo!), and I am really proud of how hard my kids worked. As a reward, we watched the movie Mary Poppins, and get this- 21 of my 30 students had never seen it before! Once I got over the shock of that statistic, I felt like I had truly accomplished something by introducing them to such a classic. How had they successfully navigated through life thus far without knowing that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down?

• Fonzie has started an origami craze that is sweeping the 4th grade. It began with him teaching a couple of kids how to make a paper crane, and now they've got books with instructions and every color paper you can imagine. Here are some of their recent creations:

• Today we had quite an interesting discussion about how the end of the world is predicted for tomorrow. As you can imagine, the conversation went all over the place. I loved it. They threw some awesome questions at me, and my favorites were: 1) Is it true that everyone dies, but not everyone lives? and 2) Can God make a rock that he can't move? I had fun figuring out how to answer them. I gave more of an explanation during the actual discussion, but my basic answers to each were yes to number one and no to number two. How would you have answered?