Leg Hug!

Let's see...where to begin?

I was subbing in a different first grade class today and it was a little bit crazy.

After all, there are only 11 days left of school and this weekend is a four day weekend due to tomorrow's furlough day and Memorial Day on Monday.

The teacher left me REALLY detailed lesson plans - I think it was four pages and I only had the kids until 1:45 because they had PE and music at the end of the day and got dismissed from music. I carried that packet around all day and was constantly reading it to remember what I was doing. Even then, I forgot a couple things!

Oddly, even though I've not subbed in this class yet this year, nor did I sub in the kindergarten at this school last year, I knew a few of the kids already! Two went to kindergarten at other schools were I'd subbed in their classes, one was in a Head Start preschool class I subbed for 3 years ago, and another was in a different first grade class at the beginning of the year. I managed to learn the rest of their names pretty quickly (although I did have some trouble with 5 C/K names that all had 2 syllables).

I did not read Earthquack! again today, but I did read Piggie Pie! And now it's official, my Piggie Pie! book is falling apart - a page fell out today when I was reading it!

Lastly, my final story is the inspiration for today's title. During virtually every carpet time one of the girls I knew from last year was my best buddy. She sat right next to my chair and kept reaching out and hugging my right leg. Sometimes she'd just sit there with her arms around my leg and every so often hug it tight and say, "I'm never gonna let you go!" (In a sweet, "I really like you" sort of way, not a menacing one). Once she decided she was going to wrap her legs around my leg too, but I stopped her at that. She then settled for playing with my sparkly shoes and admiring my sparkly fingernails.

Day of Ailments and "Qwakes"

Today was busy, busy, busy!

First off, there were lots of ailments today! Here's a sampling:

"My head hurts."
"My stomach hurts."

"My arm itches."

"My leg hurts."

"My tooth hurts."

"My cut is bleeding."

"My knee hurts."

"My throat hurts."

These were followed by requests for band-aids, and trips to the office for ice packs, itch medicine, and cough drops. Many were denied. I do believe many requests were simply fabricated. Seriously, every 10 minutes or so someone was coming up to me with a complaint or an owie. Mostly I just responded with, "Oh, I'm sorry!" and asked them to go back to work. First graders are too dramatic with their injuries.

Late in the day, were about to take a recess break. It hadn't been raining for a while and I thought maybe we could actually go outside. Well, after I get them cleaned up I look outside and see a slightly ominous cloud in the distance. I decided not to risk it and let them play inside. Not 3 minutes later it starts pouring down rain so hard the noise of it got ever one's attention. Turned out it was a good decision to stay inside!

Lastly, at the end of the day I read the class a story I had been teasing about all day. They were eager to hear it because I told them it was funny and that it had some kid's name in it from their classroom. The book was called Earthquack! and it's an adaptation of Chicken Little. The main character in this one is named Chucky Ducky and instead of thinking the sky is falling, he thinks "the earth is crumbling!" and proclaims often, "It's a quake!" I read it Chucky Ducky's voice kind of like this: "The earth is cwumbling! It's a qwake!" After about a page or so of this I hear a couple girls comment to each other that Chucky Ducky is "so cute! And his voice is so cute too!" I think it's pretty adorable that they don't really realize it's just Miss Barnes making up voices and they really think that's his true, actual voice. As the kids were leaving the room after the bell rang I heard many of them repeating to each other, "The earth is cwumbling! It's a qwake!" :)

I Lose, Again

Back to the LRC today!

Seems I do this job in spurts, doesn't it?

Anyway, today was pretty normal. I helped kids with math and reading and writing in groups of 1, 2, or 3 and sometimes I let them stop 5 minutes early and play with the toys in the room.

I also got to play another card game with one of the older boys. We played Magic again, and despite me remembering some of what to do, he hasn't really taught me any strategies so I think I basically put my creature cards out there for him to destroy a turn or so later. There's some sort of attacking involved, but I never really got the lesson on that, so I pretty much just slowing lost my points. Then we played some other similar game. I can't remember what it was called. It wasn't Pokemon, but something like that I think. Partway through our game another boy came in to work on some writing and he knew the game. He looked at my cards while the one I was playing against was on the phone with his mom. He told me I had a good card. (Go figure!) However, we didn't finish this game as my opponent had to leave shortly after that. I will never realize my full potential at Magic card games! Perhaps I should read up on the rules before I sub for LRC again? :)

I Fix Stuff

Today was pretty typical and therefore I don't have much to tell you.

Although it was nice to have an easy-ish, normal day so late in May! I shall cherish it.

Basically, the only weird thing that happened was that some person came in to take spring photos of a few kids who brought their form back and then they wanted the whole class for a group shot. That got us a little behind for the morning after we walked out to the grassy area of the playground to do the photo.

The rest of the day was basically reading, writing, and math (I'm sorry, I refuse to say "'rithmatic" because it's just dumb.) I was nice and let them draw while I read aloud the third book in the Gregor series, and I was also nice when I let them sit wherever they wanted during writing time.

In other events, I fixed the projector. Well, it worked at least. The IA in the room told me it hadn't been working a week or so ago and someone came in to fix it and they did, but then the document camera wasn't working and the projector was projecting too large an image to fit completely on the screen. Well, the second thing I knew how to fix, so I adjusted that, then I decided to take a stab at the doc cam. I turned it on to see what would happen and it worked right away! So either someone else fixed it over the weekend or I just have the magic touch. Either way, I'm sure the teacher will be pleased to have it up and running tomorrow. :)

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!

Do You Know What That Stuff Is?

Today was another busy day in kindergarten. In fact, we had a wild day in kindergarten! (We read Miss Bindergarten as a Wild Day in Kindergarten.) And the kids were just a bit cookoo.

The day was pretty basic: breakfast/snack, playtime, story, writing, recess, calendar, math, home.

Funniest moment of the day came when I was chatting with one boy during breakfast. He asked me if I had a big house. I said no, that I lived in an apartment. He asked if I had any kids, I said now. Then he proceeded to tell me how when he was born, his mommy "pushed him out". Then he told me that the doctor cleaned him off 'cuz he had stuff on him. Then he looked at me and said, "Do you know what that stuff is called?" I told him that no I did not and he should ask his mom! :)

Magic

It was back to LRC today, and there was much less stressing! In fact, stressed out boy from last week didn't even mention middle school today. He came in and unloaded his entire backpack (not exaggerating) and handed me a couple decks of Magic cards. I asked him if he wanted to play and he said, "If you wanna." So I said ok, and he "taught"me how to play. When I saw "taught" I basically mean, he told me to play a card and I'd show him one at a time and say, "Can I play this?" until he said yes. Then he'd play a whole bunch of things and start moving all the cards around and announcing I now only had 10 points and he had 15. I don't doubt that everything he was doing was perfectly legal, but I wasn't exactly being kept in the loop! Eventually, after attempting in vain to summon the right creatures and attack dear student, he put me out of my misery and destroyed me. I was baffled by how complicated the game was! I think I'll stick to Catan.

The rest of the day was just gravy. I think for a brief time I was in charge of 3 students at once. The rest of the day I pretty much had one at a time. It was nice.