Today was tough. As in, I walk into the office and our secretaries hand me a cup of Reese’s Pieces and peanut butter pretzels tough. They knew it’d get me through my meeting after school (they really are the best people).

I don’t want to blog about the tough though. Instead, I want to focus on the laughs and smiles we shared today.

One student has taken to calling squares “squambuses” since a square is also a rhombus.

Another student told me I should make it a job to flip over the classroom calendar marker of the day. I told her it could be her job for the rest of the year. She couldn’t stop smiling under her mask.

A third student is writing a nonfiction piece about his baby brother. He laughed with me over his brother’s love of pancakes.

One student decided she’s making a nonfiction story about “how to have a play date.” Her audience? My daughter S. She has spent a lot of time asking me specific questions about S and her friends.

We had a large whole class discussion on the best temperature mozzarella sticks need to be for ultimate cheese stretch-age. I turned around to see a bunch of my students seeing how far they could stretch the mozzarella cheese. This sent me into a story from my childhood, which would make a great slice another day.

A lot of giggles were had over why water beads up when dropped on top of baby powder. They were shocked when I started discussing baby pee and poop in class.

Students were genuinely excited about the new books we have for nonfiction book clubs. It made me happy since my teammates and I dropped everything yesterday to restructure this unit to make it better for their needs.

A lot of cheering when I said we were going to figure out how to make Oobleck in the coming week.

A student who has been having a hard time writing came up to me beaming with pride that he wrote an introduction based off an idea he got from reading group that morning.

Some days, finding the joy is hard. Today was one of those days until I got going. Then I realized how even though I’m exhausted, I still had plenty to smile about.