Last-Minute Friday

Well, this blog is a little after the fact, but since I was out of town Friday night and Saturday visiting Dani, I did not have time to write an entry about my day subbing on Friday until now!

This day I got one of the latest calls I'd ever gotten - around 10:50. I'd spent the morning packing and getting ready for my weekend in Vancouver. I was totally not expecting a call by this point, but I guess I should learn to never think you've got this subbing thing figured out, because invariably something completely out of the ordinary happens!

So I scrambled around to change clothes, eat lunch and get all my stuff in the car since I was going to have to leave town right after I was done at the school. Thankfully, the school was one nearby and it was also a school with an earlier release time than some.

I got there and found out from the teacher the reason for the late call: apparently the teacher had wanted to go to some meeting/seminar thing that was that afternoon but didn't want to ask for a sub for the afternoon until one of the other teachers in the school heard about this and said that she should just have them call and see if they could get a sub. Well, they could, and it was me, so here I come strolling into the building at noon. The kids (2nd graders) are outside when I arrived, because this was the day the school was having some jog-a-thon sort of event. Of course it was raining steadily all day, so all the kids came back in completely soaked. The teacher next door told me that she was going to let all of her kids go change if they brought a change of clothes and then just kill time until lunch which was in about 15 minutes. So that was what we did as well. Lots of kids headed to the bathrooms to change, and others sat around and looked at books, or drew or visited. I just supervised...and periodically went over to the girls bathroom to ask to girls to get changed and come back and not be so loud. :) It wasn't long before lunch when I paraded them all up to the cafeteria and returned to the room to read my book (Graceling by Kristin Cashore- which I am still working on, and LOVING by the way).

Since it was raining, the kids had inside recess, which meant they returned to the room after their lunch and played with games. The recess duty people kept an eye on the rooms so I didn't have to be there, but I decided to hang around and visit with the students if any of them wanted to chat with me. Turns out on boy in particular wanted to play games with me. First he brought over a couple Rubik's cubes and wanted me to try to solve it. I manged to get one face all one color - which is the best I can do without instructions - and this had him and some of the other kids around amazed and prompted questions such as, "How'd you DO that?!" I enlightened them by stating, "I just turned it around and around until it looked like that." haha how else do you explain it though?? Then we played Uno and War and he beat me every time - which he was quite proud of....as he should be...because I'm pretty tough competition! haha

After recess the kids had to work on math workplaces which is one of the key components of the Bridges/Investigations math curriculum that all of the Salem-Keizer school district uses. So needless to say I have done them LOTS of time. Teachers generally like to have subs do workplaces, because usually the kids are pretty well trained on how to manage themselves during that time, and it's fairly simple for a sub to supervise. They were finishing up this particular round of stations, so the teacher wanted me to check their folders when they were done to makes sure they'd done all the parts and then let them have free time. It went pretty smoothly, after about 30 minutes most of the kids were done, and I had more of a chance to help a few that seemed really confused finish one of the stations. I also had one sweet little girl offer to help them, so of course I let her. Between the two of us we helped them understand the project and before time was up all of the kids had finished! Yay!

After the cleaned up we did another quick little math activity that I led, and then it was time to pack up and go home. I quickly wrote a letter to the teacher, and got my stuff together and raced out of there. Made it out of town by about 3:45. Traffic was horrible all through Portland and I was very relieved to finally arrive in Vancouver. Had a fun weekend with Dani even though it was quick. Today I had church and then spent the afternoon goofing around with Sarah. And tomorrow we start the madness that is subbing all over again! Only a 4-day week though as Friday is a Statewide Inservice Day. :)