Friday, September 25, 2009

Say What?

As a kindergarten teacher, I find myself saying things I never imagined I'd have to say. Here's a sample of things I've said just this year--and, mind you, we've only been in school 23 days:

  • Please don't walk down the hall with your eyes closed.
  • We shouldn't call our friends "major losers".
  • Let's not spit on each other.
  • If you yell "BORING!" one more time, I'll send you back to your seat.
  • We DO NOT crawl into other people's bathroom stalls!
  • And my personal favorite--We do not pretend to smell our friends' butts when they're hanging upside down on the monkey bars.

You just can't make this stuff up.....

Thursday, September 24, 2009

When Life Gives You Lemons...or Dinosaurs

Kindergarten children are hilarious. What is most funny about them is that they don't know how funny they are. We practiced clapping syllables in words today. We must have clapped forty seven words...LE-MONS! WA-GON! DI-NO-SAUR! JEEP! It was beautiful--they were getting every single one...and then, they went to their seats. Suddenly, I'm walking around the room and I hear, "Be-e-ed! Three!" (That's bed, by the way.) Everything we had just practiced had absolutely NO application to what they were currently doing. And they were so sure they were RIGHT. When I went around and pointed out that bed, in fact, has ONE syllable, not three, they stared at me blankly and then demonstrated the three claps in the word. Clearly, we needed more practice. So, with some major assistance, everyone managed to get all their words sorted correctly and ended up with stickers on their papers. And yet, tomorrow, when we go over this again, I'll hear, "LE-MONS! THREE!" Oh well...when life gives you lemons, pretend it has three syllables, like lemonade.