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!