Cut and Paste

It is so nice to know the night before where you'll be going the next morning. I'd had my job for today for a few days, which is even nicer. It was for a 1/2 blend in south Salem. I'd been requested to sub by the teacher, who I know.

The kids were pretty good, although they ability group all of the first and second grades for reading, and the teacher I was subbing for and the teacher next door switched classes for math (well, the 2nd graders went next door and all the first graders came to me) so that made it a little more difficult to remember which kids were mine and which I had just seen at some point in the day.

We did a lot of cutting and pasting today. For reading, my reading class and the reading class next door got together and made paper scarecrows, which involved cutting out pants, a shirt, 2 boots, 2 gloves, a head, hat, and scarf. Which is a lot of cutting for little guys. So it took a good hour to do this. We had 4 adults in the room helping, which was good. We when around picking up scraps of paper and taking them to the recycling, finding the specific tracer that a kid needed, counting all their pieces to make sure they had everything, etc. It was very busy, but they did a good job.

Later in the day with my math group we made paper crabs. They are leaning to count by tens and do math in groups of ten, and since crabs have 10 legs they are used a lot of visuals in the Bridges program. The kids made the crabs today and later they will arrange them into a chart. So again I was dealing with kids trying to cut out a bunch of little legs and bodies and get them glued together correctly. After this I was very glad to be done with cutting!

At the end of the day I had my class back and they were writing stories about bats and drawing pictures for their stories. I put in a CD of Disney music to play while they worked. They REALLY liked that. The only problem was that they wanted to get up and dance for every song! But I just told them that if the music was too distracting that they couldn't get their work done I'd turn it off. So they got back to work and enjoyed trying to be the first to figure out what song was playing and what movie it was from. They knew all of them even though some were from older movies like Mary Poppins and Aladdin.

By the end of the day I had a headache and I'm not sure why. They weren't that loud, and I didn't feel like I had to raise my voice that much. Tis a puzzle. Perhaps I did not have enough caffeine. I came home, took some Excedrin (caffeine) and had a Pepsi (caffeine) and I'm feeling much better! :) Now I'm heading off to Corban to see their play: Twelfth Night. Should be fun. I love Shakespeare and this is one of my favorites!