Leg Hug!

Let's see...where to begin?

I was subbing in a different first grade class today and it was a little bit crazy.

After all, there are only 11 days left of school and this weekend is a four day weekend due to tomorrow's furlough day and Memorial Day on Monday.

The teacher left me REALLY detailed lesson plans - I think it was four pages and I only had the kids until 1:45 because they had PE and music at the end of the day and got dismissed from music. I carried that packet around all day and was constantly reading it to remember what I was doing. Even then, I forgot a couple things!

Oddly, even though I've not subbed in this class yet this year, nor did I sub in the kindergarten at this school last year, I knew a few of the kids already! Two went to kindergarten at other schools were I'd subbed in their classes, one was in a Head Start preschool class I subbed for 3 years ago, and another was in a different first grade class at the beginning of the year. I managed to learn the rest of their names pretty quickly (although I did have some trouble with 5 C/K names that all had 2 syllables).

I did not read Earthquack! again today, but I did read Piggie Pie! And now it's official, my Piggie Pie! book is falling apart - a page fell out today when I was reading it!

Lastly, my final story is the inspiration for today's title. During virtually every carpet time one of the girls I knew from last year was my best buddy. She sat right next to my chair and kept reaching out and hugging my right leg. Sometimes she'd just sit there with her arms around my leg and every so often hug it tight and say, "I'm never gonna let you go!" (In a sweet, "I really like you" sort of way, not a menacing one). Once she decided she was going to wrap her legs around my leg too, but I stopped her at that. She then settled for playing with my sparkly shoes and admiring my sparkly fingernails.

Day of Ailments and "Qwakes"

Today was busy, busy, busy!

First off, there were lots of ailments today! Here's a sampling:

"My head hurts."
"My stomach hurts."

"My arm itches."

"My leg hurts."

"My tooth hurts."

"My cut is bleeding."

"My knee hurts."

"My throat hurts."

These were followed by requests for band-aids, and trips to the office for ice packs, itch medicine, and cough drops. Many were denied. I do believe many requests were simply fabricated. Seriously, every 10 minutes or so someone was coming up to me with a complaint or an owie. Mostly I just responded with, "Oh, I'm sorry!" and asked them to go back to work. First graders are too dramatic with their injuries.

Late in the day, were about to take a recess break. It hadn't been raining for a while and I thought maybe we could actually go outside. Well, after I get them cleaned up I look outside and see a slightly ominous cloud in the distance. I decided not to risk it and let them play inside. Not 3 minutes later it starts pouring down rain so hard the noise of it got ever one's attention. Turned out it was a good decision to stay inside!

Lastly, at the end of the day I read the class a story I had been teasing about all day. They were eager to hear it because I told them it was funny and that it had some kid's name in it from their classroom. The book was called Earthquack! and it's an adaptation of Chicken Little. The main character in this one is named Chucky Ducky and instead of thinking the sky is falling, he thinks "the earth is crumbling!" and proclaims often, "It's a quake!" I read it Chucky Ducky's voice kind of like this: "The earth is cwumbling! It's a qwake!" After about a page or so of this I hear a couple girls comment to each other that Chucky Ducky is "so cute! And his voice is so cute too!" I think it's pretty adorable that they don't really realize it's just Miss Barnes making up voices and they really think that's his true, actual voice. As the kids were leaving the room after the bell rang I heard many of them repeating to each other, "The earth is cwumbling! It's a qwake!" :)

I Lose, Again

Back to the LRC today!

Seems I do this job in spurts, doesn't it?

Anyway, today was pretty normal. I helped kids with math and reading and writing in groups of 1, 2, or 3 and sometimes I let them stop 5 minutes early and play with the toys in the room.

I also got to play another card game with one of the older boys. We played Magic again, and despite me remembering some of what to do, he hasn't really taught me any strategies so I think I basically put my creature cards out there for him to destroy a turn or so later. There's some sort of attacking involved, but I never really got the lesson on that, so I pretty much just slowing lost my points. Then we played some other similar game. I can't remember what it was called. It wasn't Pokemon, but something like that I think. Partway through our game another boy came in to work on some writing and he knew the game. He looked at my cards while the one I was playing against was on the phone with his mom. He told me I had a good card. (Go figure!) However, we didn't finish this game as my opponent had to leave shortly after that. I will never realize my full potential at Magic card games! Perhaps I should read up on the rules before I sub for LRC again? :)

I Fix Stuff

Today was pretty typical and therefore I don't have much to tell you.

Although it was nice to have an easy-ish, normal day so late in May! I shall cherish it.

Basically, the only weird thing that happened was that some person came in to take spring photos of a few kids who brought their form back and then they wanted the whole class for a group shot. That got us a little behind for the morning after we walked out to the grassy area of the playground to do the photo.

The rest of the day was basically reading, writing, and math (I'm sorry, I refuse to say "'rithmatic" because it's just dumb.) I was nice and let them draw while I read aloud the third book in the Gregor series, and I was also nice when I let them sit wherever they wanted during writing time.

In other events, I fixed the projector. Well, it worked at least. The IA in the room told me it hadn't been working a week or so ago and someone came in to fix it and they did, but then the document camera wasn't working and the projector was projecting too large an image to fit completely on the screen. Well, the second thing I knew how to fix, so I adjusted that, then I decided to take a stab at the doc cam. I turned it on to see what would happen and it worked right away! So either someone else fixed it over the weekend or I just have the magic touch. Either way, I'm sure the teacher will be pleased to have it up and running tomorrow. :)

This Time, It's an Earthquack

Today was a little bizarre.

The morning started off alright with a group of busy but friendly 1st graders. A parent volunteer came in to do some planting project with the kids while I tried to manage the rest of them. This turned out to be a little harder than I anticipated since the planting took a while, and the class was finishing their projects and I didn't want to start something new with part of the class out of the room. Eventually, they finished, but we were about 30 behind on the schedule. No problem though, I'm just trying to calculate how to make up a few minutes here and there to get back on track.

So we do a spelling test, and maybe make up 5 minutes. Then I gather the kids to the carpet to read a book the teacher left. It's called Earthquack! and is basically an adaptation of Chicken Little. We get to a certain point in the story where the teacher wanted me to stop and have the kids write and sketch their prediction of what's going to happen next. I explain this to them and pass out the papers.

Now this is where things get weird...

Not 5 seconds after they are walking back to their seats does an announcement come over the intercom that we are having an earthquake drill! (The irony is not lost on the kiddos as they proclaim, "It's a quake! It's a quake!" in the funny voice I've been using for the characters in the book). All the kids crawl under the tables and we begin to wait....

And wait....

And wait.

I swear, it's been at least 2 minutes and I'm starting to wonder: They are going to come back on and tell us when to go outside, right? I'm having visions of the whole school getting under desks for a minute, then on their own lining up outside while we're all still hiding under out tables! Well, we must have waited 5 minutes - once I even got out and peeked out in the hall to make sure no one was out and about. Finally, FINALLY - they came on and told us to evacuate.

Now for part two of why I hate this earthquake drill:

We have to walk around practically the whole school (okay, maybe half) to get to our designated line-up place. The kids are doing a terrible job of walking quietly, and I'm trying to shut them up and also figure out where in the heck we're going. Finally we get there, and it's a lot easier to tell them to zip it when they are standing in one place and not on the move. I was very happy when they let us go and we made it back to the room!

So by now, we're like 50 minutes behind in the schedule and we never could quite make that up. I had to skip 2 reading groups, and because they were so wound up the rest of the day I shortened the math lesson. This ended up being a wise choice as a few kids didn't even finish the part I did have them do.

The one thing they did do fast today however was getting their stuff and being ready to go home! That took like 4 minutes, so I had time to read Piggie Pie (which happened to be by the same author as the book from this morning) - it is starting to get really worn and a few pages are about to fall out...I think I may have to buy a new copy for next year!

Do You Know What That Stuff Is?

Today was another busy day in kindergarten. In fact, we had a wild day in kindergarten! (We read Miss Bindergarten as a Wild Day in Kindergarten.) And the kids were just a bit cookoo.

The day was pretty basic: breakfast/snack, playtime, story, writing, recess, calendar, math, home.

Funniest moment of the day came when I was chatting with one boy during breakfast. He asked me if I had a big house. I said no, that I lived in an apartment. He asked if I had any kids, I said now. Then he proceeded to tell me how when he was born, his mommy "pushed him out". Then he told me that the doctor cleaned him off 'cuz he had stuff on him. Then he looked at me and said, "Do you know what that stuff is called?" I told him that no I did not and he should ask his mom! :)

Magic

It was back to LRC today, and there was much less stressing! In fact, stressed out boy from last week didn't even mention middle school today. He came in and unloaded his entire backpack (not exaggerating) and handed me a couple decks of Magic cards. I asked him if he wanted to play and he said, "If you wanna." So I said ok, and he "taught"me how to play. When I saw "taught" I basically mean, he told me to play a card and I'd show him one at a time and say, "Can I play this?" until he said yes. Then he'd play a whole bunch of things and start moving all the cards around and announcing I now only had 10 points and he had 15. I don't doubt that everything he was doing was perfectly legal, but I wasn't exactly being kept in the loop! Eventually, after attempting in vain to summon the right creatures and attack dear student, he put me out of my misery and destroyed me. I was baffled by how complicated the game was! I think I'll stick to Catan.

The rest of the day was just gravy. I think for a brief time I was in charge of 3 students at once. The rest of the day I pretty much had one at a time. It was nice.

Symmetry, Teeth and Crying

Have you noticed that lots of my titles for my posts this year have been a list of two or three things? I guess I'm running out of unique titles, so this helps!

This afternoon I worked in a first grade (different one from Friday) and it was just not easy.

Granted, it was better than last time I was there...and from what I hear, went better than the last time they had a sub (which wasn't me because I was in another room that day). I sent one girl to the office because she kept whining and crying and pitching a fit about everything and disrupting the whole class. Seriously, picture a cranky 2-3 year old throwing a tantrum and that's what she's like. Not even kidding.

Another boy I sent to the hall a couple times because he was giving me 'tude. Once I sent him out and said he could come back when he was ready to be polite. So he walked out of the room and then turned right around and came back in. I stopped him and said, "Oh, no. Not yet. I'm not ready for you to come back yet. You sit out there and think about it for a while."

So, not flawless, but ok.

We talked about lines of symmetry after doing this complicated math project that I already did with another first grade this year. I'd sort of spontaneously thrown in the symmetry part with the previous class because it fit in and they'd been talking about symmetry in their class previously. Well, today's teacher saw what I'd done with that class so wanted me to do that with hers. The chart, the symmetry, all of it. So I get to the symmetry part and ask if anyone can tell me what that is and none of them know! Apparently they'd not talked about it before. I almost didn't do it, but decided to try. So I taught them shortly what a line of symmetry is and we did a bunch of examples on our chart. They seemed to get it pretty quickly....I guess their teacher will see how much they remember tomorrow.

Lastly, and read (well, sort of skimmed) a book about teeth to the class (it was too long!). Then they colored this 3-d model of teeth, and cut it out and assembled it.

All that took up the whole day. And once again I was happy to send the couple little stinkers home!

Piggies, Drama, and 'Oops'es!

Alright, I'm finally getting caught up! I really hope blogger doesn't go down maintenance again right at the time I wast to use it!

So Friday I subbed in a very familiar first grade class - in fact, I've subbed for this teacher 9 full days this year and 7 half days so far. The routine and behaviors are pretty much the same.

This time we read a few "piggie" books. One was left by the teacher along with some activities, and I read another pig book of my own - one of my personal favorites, Piggie Pie.

We also had some required drama as two girls were arguing and then crying over how one had her feelings hurt and the other was embarrassed and it was the first girl's fault. Then it was my fault. Then the embarrassed girl got really snarly and I told the two to separate and left her to pout. About 20 minutes later they skip up to me with big smiles telling me they've "worked it out". I don't know why I waste time with this drama. Next time I think I'll just tell them to cool off for a while and not bug me.

It was a bit of an "off" day for me though. During this compound word game the class was playing I didn't see how the words "bean" and "jelly" went together, until a kid pointed out that it wasn't "beanjelly" but "jellybean"! I did the same thing later with the word "life". I couldn't figure out what word it went with, so the same boy had to show me that it went with "boat" to make "lifeboat". I tell ya - it was getting a little ridiculous! THEN, at the end of the day we were waiting and waiting for the popcorn to arrive that kids ordered in the morning. It never came and I was puzzled at what to do when another kid asked me if I'd sent the envelope down in the morning. Oops. No. No, I didn't. Good thing it's Friday.

You Shouldn't Be This Stressed!

Today was supposed to be my well deserved reprieve after yesterday's torture.

And it mostly was. I had a quiet, low key day in the LRC helping kids with math and reading in groups of 2 or 3.

The stressful part of the day was when I meet with a 5th grade boy for a half hour. The poor kid was enormously stressed about the prospect of middle school next year. He talked to me for a long time about how he was afraid the kids there would make fun of him and beat him up. He also told me how he knew this would happen because middle school kids are bad and they curse and do drugs and get taken out of school in handcuffs. I tried to reassure him that not all kids were like that, and that he just needed to be around the right people. I also told him that they have counselors and teachers at middle school that can help him and talk to him and that they school wouldn't allow people to beat him up. He seemed basically unconvinced of my assertions and kept saying he knew it would bad. I encouraged him to ask questions when the middle school folks come to talk to his class. Maybe knowing what to expect would help him be less worried - maybe I'd be right and he wouldn't even have many, in any, classes with the older kids he was so worried about. By the time he went back to class I was exhausted! I'm not cut out to be a counselor!

Thank Goodness for Early Dismissal!

I'm back finally! Yes, I have been working all week, and I would have written blogs for the past three days (it's now Saturday despite the date of this post), but blogger was down for 2 nights and the other night I wasn't home until late.

Anyway, now it's time to relieve my horror of a day that was Wednesday!

It started off all right with my arrival to a school that I've only been to once before. The classroom and building was nice, and the class list only had 20 kids on it. However, every adult that spoke to me indicated (very subtly) that this class was not going to be a cake walk. That's fine. I can deal with squirrelly and naughty.

These kids were not squirrelly and naughty.

They were malicious and spiteful and disobedient and uncooperative.

There were only 18 kids there and I swear it felt like 45.

Now, I should say, in most cases of naughty classes, there are about half of the kids that really are good and kind of get overwhelmed by their troublesome classmates. However, there were only 2 or 3 of those kids in this class. The rest sort of just played along with the tide of rudeness.

I had two boys chasing each other around the classroom whenever they got the chance, one boy who only knew the word, "No!", a girl who told me I was wrong and made faces at me when I informed her she was not in charge, another boy who thought directions applied to everyone BUT him, and a whole room full of chatty, disruptive, and snarly 2nd and 3rd graders who seemed to resent everything I said.

The attitudes I got really felt like middle-school stuff. It was scary.

Thankfully, it was an early dismissal day so I got to send them home at 1:45. I really don't think I could have made it until 3. I don't believe I will be returning to this class again!

Bubbles and Paper Plates

Today I returned to one of the schools I used to go to all the time but haven't been to much lately. However, I had been to this class before way back in September. Some remembered me after a while. I didn't really remember any of them, but I learned most of their names.

Shortly after they all arrived in the morning and remembered who I was, they started requesting that I read them "that pig book" that I read last time I was there. Took me a minute to figure out what book they were talking about since they didn't actually remember it was pigs at first. Unfortunately, I didn't have it with me today. We ended up reading The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig instead which they liked (and which is now overdue at the library!).

In the afternoon we went outside to blow bubbles. Apparently it was "bubble day" in the classroom, or so they kept telling me. The teacher had it marked on the schedule to do that for 45 minutes, but they seemed bored after 20 and I was tired of supervising and keeping them out of the way of the older kids at recess and then keeping them away from the classroom windows, so we went in and I read stories.

The kids had PE and music today so my afternoon was really short and I had a huge prep period at the end of the day - I didn't even have to go back and get them because they got dismissed from PE. No relaxing for me though! I help the sub next door do a project the 1st grade team had left for her - glue 2 paper plates rim to rim with bottoms facing out, then glue 3 of these sets together to make a little tower. First she ran the glue gun and I put the plates together, then we switched. By the time we were done we'd made 65 plate stacks, and our hands were cramping from the glue gun!

I'm Back, Kids!

This morning I subbed again in the same class I did on Friday. I bunch of kids were gone at the start of the day, but unfortunately, the rest tried to pick up the slack. They were pretty chatty.

We finished off with some last Princess and the Pea activities, then did a compound word game, which I thought would be really fun for them (it's usually the kind of activity that first graders love), but they just seemed bored with it. However, the morning went by really fast and then I was done!

I Never Cease to Be Amazed

AH I'm behind!

This was supposed to be done already, but now it's Tuesday and I'm trying to remember what I was going to write about for Friday.

Ok, so we did a lot of stuff about The Princess and the Pea today. We read 3 books (one traditional, two silly), did a sequencing/writing activity, and made a chart comparing the 3 books. They did really well with the comparing, and we had a pretty impressive chart when we were done. We also did some math, which was kind of tough for some of them. However, the instructional coach came around right about that time and she helped some of them as well.

Surprising but not moment of the day was when it was time to fill out one kid's behavior card at the end of the day. He either gets "wonderful", "ok" or "not good" ratings for morning and afternoon. Well, all day he'd been pretty much a pill (not following directions, not doing work, interrupting, bugging others, whining, arguing with me, hiding when time to line up from recess, etc.) So when I went to talk to him about his card before they went home he asked me if he'd gotten an "ok" - like he was really sure that's what he would get. I had to explain to him why he did not get an "ok" and he was not too happy with me. Thankfully, then he went home. :)

Oh Rats!

I could have worked today.

But somehow, my phone got bumped to silent mode and therefore I didn't hear the call when it came in at 6:00 am. By the time I noticed, it was too late and I didn't get another.

Kind of mad at myself for that.

Tonight, I am happy to have a job in advance for tomorrow.

Appreciate Me!

It's that day again - Substitute Appreciation Day (where subs get recognized as much as any day (not a lot) and really almost forgotten because it's Teacher Appreciation WEEK and well, people remember that.) Haha, I sound bitter - really I'm not - it's just that the whole practice seems a little ridiculous to me. Hardly anyone in the district remembers it's Sub Appreciation Day anyway (one person remarked on it to me today) and they're the people that already make you feel appreciated everyday you come in anyway.

Today I spend my hours in the library - something I'll likely not be doing next year as the district is cutting all library positions except for high school. I checked-in bunches of books, then shelved them, then straightened shelf after shelf after shelf.

I also supervised one class while they worked on computers, read another class a story, and showed a third class a video on DVD and an interactive video/activity online. And then I helped them all find books they wanted to check out. I love the library, but my eyes were bugging out of my head a little after all the Dewey-decimal reading!

Triangles and Elephants

Today was another nice day hangin' in my friend's bilingual 1st grade class. Despite my lack of bilingual-ness, I still enjoyed myself.

The IA did a couple activities that needed to be in Spanish in the morning and the rest of the day just went swimmingly in English. We did some reading and writing activities in the morning and art and math in the afternoon.

Most noteworthy activities of the day:

- We went on a triangle hunt around the school. All the kids carried clipboards with paper and a pencil as we walked down the halls and around the playground looking for things shaped like triangles. The kindergarten class I sub for a lot happened to be out at recess at this time, so that was interesting as a bunch of them wanted to come talk to me. :)

- After reading a book about an elephant, I taught the kids how to draw and elephant. We looked for shapes in the elephant (like circle for his body, egg for his head, triangle for his ear) and drew them all together. Pretty soon they all had really cute, really different elephants that they were SO proud of! Seriously, almost all of them were holding theirs up and calling, "Look at mine, teacher!" It was fun.

Texting and the Wrong Way

This afternoon I worked (for a short period of time) in a second grade classroom. Seriously, it was pretty short. I got there at noon and the kids went to recess. I picked them up thirty minutes later. Then I helped them with math and read a Weekly Reader with them which took a little over an hour. Next the class split up and went to a bunch of different places for a reading time. I ended up having a group of 6. When this was over I took my original class to PE. From there they went to music where I picked them up 5 minutes before dismissal. I had to sort out a bunch of papers and file them during the prep times.

Best moment of the day: The Weekly Reader was about different ways insect communicate. We were discussing the different ways humans can communicate (signing, acting things out, body language, facial expressions, etc.) I was calling on kids to offer up other ideas when one came up with "texting!" A parent had happened into the room just before this to drop off some stuff for the teacher and she and I shared our own non-verbal communication of amusement from across the room. :)

Most embarrassing moment of the day: I went to pick up the class from music and started walking across the school to get there. I passed another teacher in the hall and shortly after realized I was actually going the wrong way! So I turned around to go to the right place. Well, the teacher I passed noticed and turned around to ask me if I was looking for him. I said, no, that I'd just forgotten where I was going. So I start walking to the Music room, but for some idiotic reason I go to the gym (which is close to the music room, but still). I poke my head in and think "This isn't my class..." Then I realize that I dropped them off at PE, but I'm supposed to pick them up at music! So I turn around and who's behind me? You guessed it! Teacher-man! He then asks me if he can help me find something and I say no, that I'm just having a moment, and came to the gym instead of the music room like I was supposed to. I did finally find the class and make it back to the room in one piece without running into teacher-man again!