School

Last week was the last week of school before the Christmas break.  Can you say wild children.  They were really on a tear.  I became the cross ole lady and Ms H was loud.  This woman rarely raises her voice.  Tuesday, she yelled. 

We continued working on the wreath of contractions.  I spent most of the time peeling off words that they just glued on in order to be done.  I worked with reading, phonics, and an art/math project.  Again with the gluing. 

The project was the Twelve Days of Christmas.  They had two sheets with the 12 items of the song.  They were to find the one with the word first, write 1st, cut it out, and glue to a long strip of paper.  Then find second, write 2nd, and continue.  Well, this didn't go well for about a third of the class. They found anything, wrote 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc, cut out and glued.  Again, I was peeling off boxes, helping them to correct what they wrote, and re-glued.  I was one sticky mess.

I read a great book to them, Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins.  Being protestant, I can't pronounce some of the words correctly.  I had asked the 3 Jewish boys to help me with pronounciation.  They loved telling an adult how to read a word.  This book tell how Hershel the Trickster fools the goblins into allowing Hanukkah to be celebrated. There are great illustrations in the books, scary golblins with lots of details.   Sorry, none of the websites show anything except the cover, or really bad videos. 

The class (really Ms H)  gave me a lovely card and a pair of silver earrings.  It was very nice to be appreiciated for my help.  I get as much out of working with the children as they do.

Art project, Ms.H strikes again

Tuesday I walked into the classroom and it was organized chaos.  Children had their shoes off and were tracing their feet onto brown construction paper.  Well, some were.  Others were falling over, they had the paper on the desk instead of the floor and were trying to reach their feet.  You try it, put your foot above your waist and try tracing it. 

Ms. H had an art project.  There were three parents besides the two of us to help the children.  And we were all busy.  It was make a turkey day.  They cut out the traced feet. The feet butted up together and became the turkey body.  Then we traced and cut out hands on red, orange, and yellow construction paper. The hands were the tail feathers. These were to be glued to the back of the feet. Eyes, beaks and waddles were cut out free hand.  All of this then was glued together.

First graders and glue . . .  Oh how they love Elmer's glue. The kids think the more glue the better.  Projects end up glued to the desk, to other children's art project, small pieces on their clothes.  Glue is in globs on the desk and ends up on me, my clothes, in little girls' hair.  They recite the rule, "not a lot, just a dot."  Their dots are bigger than adult dots.

The project was fun. The kids enjoy it and the adults do too. The glue is not really an issue because it washes off people and washes out of clothing.  I didn't scrub real well when I left for the day.  My hands looked like they were peeling from the glue.  My slacks and shirt had glue on them.  I was going home, no big deal. 

Wrong.  Marty picked me up at school and said we needed to go to the bank and then he would take me to lunch.