Today, my master teacher hands me a book right as i'm bringing the kinders in from lunch. "Do you want to read this to them? Sorry, it's the only book I could find that relates to President's Day." What was that book you ask? The freaking Gettysburg Address. With pictures of course, but the actual speech. Which I had to read to a class of 5 and 6 year olds. There were about two lines per page, which I would read and then have to stop and explain before I went on to the next page. I also had to explain the title, "The Gettysburg Address." So I explain to the class what an "address" is, and then told them that Gettysburg is a town and it is where Lincoln gave this speech. Here's the good part... one of my students raised his hand and said (and I'm going to type this as speech impediment-y as possible), "P'getty idn't a town. idt dometing you eat!" ...and from now on, I will refer to this speech as the Spaghettisburg Address.
I was out on yard duty one day, and two boys from another Kindergarten class came up to talk to me. I've never talked to either one of these boys, but one of them I have definitely seen around. He is an adorable Asian kid with a full-on mohawk. Obviously, I'm smitten. The other kid is a brunette white kid who I wouldn't be able to identify in a crowd. I don't know, they all look the same. Anyway, the two boys come up to me and point to my huge velcro orthopedic boot and ask, "What happened to your leg?"
So I told them the condensed 5-year-old version of my story, "I wasn't watching where I was going, and I stepped in a pothole in the grass. My foot bent backwards and a bone inside broke."
They both looked up at me with wide eyes. The brunette says to me, totally serious, "How did you survive?!"
In my mind, I instantly pictured myself trudging through the treacherously manicured lawn in Sal's front yard. This was my 'Nam. As I dodged around my car, the pothole was too quick for me. Down I went, writhing in (slight) pain, onto the grass.
As I looked back at the boys, I just shook my head and said, "I don't know, man. I don't know."
My students have "Reading Buddies" once a week. I take my class of kindergarteners over to a 2nd grade classroom where they are paired with a buddy to read with (in case the activity name wasn't clear enough for you). So last week when we went to the 2nd grade class, my master teacher was reading out her students names and the buddy that they are paired with. She called out a boy's name and a few of his classmates said that he wasn't in class that day. One of the boys offered up a little more information about the kid's absence and said, "He got bit by a mosquito!"
You are probably thinking the same thing that I was at that moment; a kid stayed home sick from a mosquito bite??? I tilted my head and looked over at the second grade teacher, inquisitively. Huh? She laughed quietly, and swirled her finger around her stomach area, saying, "He has a bug."
And finally, one of my favorites...
The kids had to cut out snowflakes with colored paper and then title the snowflake whatever it was that they decided the design looked like. I had to ask this student what he wrote here. "Hey, L. What does this say here?"
"Robot and peanuts."
