Kids say...

While I do have an entirely wonderful and full life outside of teaching, there were too many priceless teaching moments to ignore this week. One of my favorite elements of teaching is how kids phrase things... you could not script this stuff. Enjoy!

When talking about about the thunderstorm this week and how it made all of us feel, one my intensely-eager-external-processors, exclaimed, "Mrs. Cunningham! That thunder scared me right down to the bottom!" 

As I was checking this kids' fish poems this week, I found one that stood out dramatically. Students were supposed to follow a pattern of "describing" words to talk about their fish. One of my more reflective students was writing a really great poem about her fish called "Rainbow". Well, instead of writing "rainbow", she wrote "Rambo." So her poem read...

Rambo

Beautiful dancing

Spinning color

Rambo

I can see you

Hiding

Beautiful dancing

Rambo

We have been working on using "second grade" words when we talk (all that really means is better vocabulary then "good", "nice" and my favorite "cool"). Well one little boy raised his hand while we were writing the fish poems, clearly very eager to share a story with me. When I asked him what was going on, he said "Well, I wanted you to know that before I existed my parents had a fish. But for some reason when I starting existing they had to get rid of it!"

One of my more "challenging" students has a really hard time focusing. I have to "redirect him" roughly eight times an hour (the reason I know this is because I take an incredible amount of data on this child)! We were lining up for lunch on Wednesday and he was looking particularly confused. I couldn't tell what was going on, but I was curious because of the very difficult morning we had just had. So, I got down on my knees, looked him in the eye and inquired about his apparent confusion. This was our conversation...

 "Mrs. Cunningham, I can't believe it's lunch time."

"Why?" I asked in a sweet, calm teacher-voice.

"Because I didn't know I was here for all the morning time."

"Wow" I replied, trying not to think: No wonder we had such a awful morning!

And then he exclaimed with unmistakable excitement...

"I think my brain was sleeping, while my eyes were awake!!!"

I am so excited I have finally reached the weekend!