Thank You Teacher

This morning I got called for an afternoon job in a bilingual kindergarten.  There were no special instructions pleading for a Spanish-speaking sub, so I took the job.

When I arrived I read in the note that one little boy in particular could be quite the handful.  When the assistant arrived she also mentioned this boy and showed me his behavior card.  However, as was the case yesterday, we had more problems with a different child than we did with the one who usually had the problems.  The normally difficult child still had a few moments.  The most charming of these I believe was right after I had called clean-up time.  All the children started putting away the blocks and toys from choice time - except for this one.  He grabbed himself a stack of unifix cubes and walked in big loops around the room breaking off the cubes one at a time and dropping them on the floor - much like Hansel and Gretel did with the bread crumbs.  It was annoying.  After a bit of this and him completely ignoring me telling him to stop, he came back to get more!  I then picked up the container of cubes and said to him, "You're done."  Oddly, at this point he completely calmly retraced his steps and picked every cube back up!  And for the rest of the day he was mostly really good!  He listened.  He sat still.  He cleaned up more than any of the other kids later in the day.  It was shocking really. 

Cutest part of the day though was when we were sitting at the carpet getting ready to go to recess and this boy raised his hand.  He was sitting right in front of me, so I called on him and he stood up, saying, "Teacher, I just wanna say thank you for coming today and helping me to be a good boy and make good choices!"  Then he threw his arms out and gave me a big hug.  So I told him thank you for making good choices and working hard.  He seemed mightily pleased with himself.  It was cute.  Hopefully if I ever go back to this class he'll remember how much he admires me. :)