Blue Hands

As some of you know, I have been without internet service since Monday morning. I woke up and it wasn't working and after a few phone calls, and a couple trips to the Comcast office I managed to get someone here to work on it Tuesday night. Unfortunately, after the guy changed the modem, spliter, cord and got us hooked up again, he couldn't program the modem to our account because their servers had crashed. So I had to wait some more. Miracle of miracles though, it was working again this morning! (Much better than my original 8-10 appointment on Saturday morning).

So yes, I have been working this week, although not as much as I would like. My roommate has been easily getting twice as many calls as me, which has been really frustrating. I did not work Monday, but I did on Tuesday and Wednesday. No job today either. Thankfully, I did snag one for tomorrow! So this entry is going to be about Tuesday's job, and I'll write another for Wednesday after this.

Here we go!

On Tuesday I subbed in a first and second grade class - one I'd been to before, actually. This class. They were good again, and the day went by pretty smoothly. The literacy time was the hardest for me. They started by switching classrooms with the other first and second grades. Most of my kids left and I got a bunch of new ones. Then they did two 15 minute stations. Then they read to themselves for a bit I think. And then these 2 other teachers came in and we split the class into 3 groups and we each took one and did the lesson from the Reading Mastery program with them. That was kinda stressful, because I've only done RM a few times before, and I didn't have the book to look at in the morning when I arrived. The teachers that came in brought it with them. So I had no time to look at what I was teaching, I just had to totally wing it. It was okay though.

After that another class came in and we did writing all together. The writing assignment was for them to write something that they wished for someone else. Basically, they weren't supposed to wish for new toys and a Wii and all that stuff, but wish that their mom had a better job, or that their brother would get an A on his test, etc. The idea came from some book they'd read the previous day. It was kind of an abstract thing for this age of kids, but they did a pretty good job of it. The sweetest one was a little boy, who, all on his own, decided to write "I wish that everybody had shelter."

Oh, and in regards to the title "blue hands", another boy who was in my class only during the math time, colored the entire back of his hand blue with a markers. Isn't that charming? I didn't see him do it, I have no idea when he did it, but he did, and it was blue the rest of the day. The things a first grader will do!