Penguins on Parade

Two days in a row in one class...now that's kinda nice.  My day today had much less drama in the getting-there than it did yesterday.  No snow, or pushing cars up hills for me!  The day at school was much the same as yesterday although there were more kids here today.  I worked on a painting project with the kids in the morning while the assistant ran the literacy time (since it's all done in Spanish).  I got paint all over the table - yes, I did - the kids were relatively neat, but I spilled a container of paint - again - I did almost the exact same move yesterday!  Granted, the kids never actually touched the paint since they were just rolling a marble around in a container that I put paint in.  As well as getting paint on the table, I also got it on my shirt!  Thankfully, it was just tempera so it just washed right out.

In the afternoon I worked with the kids on the completion of a writing project.  They wrote a poem about penguins earlier in the day on a template the shape of an egg.  The egg shape eventually was to become the white stomach of a paper penguin.  We made the penguins.   This resulted in LOTS of paper bits all over the floor.  This was probably the most chaotic part of the day because all the kids were at different points of their project, and lots of them needed additional pieces of paper, but since I wasn't just letting them come and get whatever they wanted (because sure as anything they would take way too much and waste three-fourths of it), they were all crowding around me yelling out whatever they wanted as well as exclamations of "Teacher! Teacher!!".  I kept having to shoo them away trying to get them to sit at their seats and raise their hands!  This scene happened three or four times at least.  They were very excited though because when they finished their penguin with the poem I was giving them new colors of paper and letting them make a baby penguin to go with the big penguin they made.  And when you're in first grade, making a baby penguin is like, soooo much more fun than making a regular-sized one!  When I first told them they could make a baby penguin when they finished their poem I was meet with a chorus of "Awwwwwwww!"s.  You'd think I'd just brought a wagon full of puppies into the room with the reaction they game me!

After the penguin madness I had a hour prep, but it was completely taken up (to the last second) by a little project I imposed on myself to get ready for ELD (English Language Development) which is at the end of the day.  I was cutting and pasting and drawing to make a couple visuals of suitcases of clothes so we could practice talking about singular and plural words.  I was really glad I'd done it though because it made ELD go much smoother than yesterday and kept the kids engaged.  I left my creations with the teacher though since I thought she might have more use for them than I would.  Hopefully they just don't hit the recycle bin right away!