Puzzle Master

Alright, here I am - returned from my venture north to Vancouver - and it is time to blog about Friday's events!

As I mentioned in my last post, I was working in a bilingual third grade class on Friday.  They were a really sweet group and I enjoyed them.  It was also a fairly easy day for me.  We did a couple short activities in the morning before they had PE and music.  An hour later I picked them up and brought them back to class where we meet the counselor who was to give them a lesson in their room.  I sat at the desk and watched while he gave his lesson and tried to remember the kids' names.  I'd only been with them for about 2o minutes before this, so I was still trying to get a feel for the class and if there were any students I needed to keep my eyes on.  They weren't doing a great job paying attention, so I was a little unsure how that would influence my rest of my day with them.  They also kept coming up to me and asking if they could go to the bathroom, which I thought was weird as I was not the one teaching at the moment, so I had to keep telling them to sit down and that they needed to ask their counselor if they couldn't wait because he was the teacher now.  At one such moment I guess the counselor wanted to use me in some demonstration, but I was busy telling a girl to sit back down.  I just caught the end of his sentence; it was something like "...but she's distracted right now."  Oops! haha I need more warning than that!

Anyways, shortly before he left he lectured the class a little about how they need to be more respectful when they have a sub (which I thought was odd because they'd been nothing but great for me that morning.  Sure, they tested me a little - but that's completely expected, and as soon as I made it clear that I wasn't going to let them get away with doing whatever the heck they pleased, they all were really well-behaved.)  I took over and started the class on a game in the 15 minutes we had before lunch, and I noticed the counselor was still hanging around by the door observing (me? the students?)  I suppose he wanted to make sure I was really ok and they weren't walking all over me, but it did make me kind of nervous since I had no idea what he was doing. haha

The rest of the day was taken up by a couple short tests, some math games, and silent reading.  Then for the last 20 minutes of the day they had a "homework celebration" where everyone who had turned in all their homework from the week got to play games and have a treat (Cheetos).  All but one got to do this, and I mightily impressed some of the celebrating students with my ability to solve all the wooden logic puzzles.  Choruses of "Woooooow!"  "She did that?!" and "Whoa! How'd she figure that out?!" were heard all about the room.  I like to keep them impressed - helped though that the instructions were in the box and that none of them could figure out how to read them (no sense in pointing this out to them though!) ;)