back to the "real" world

Well, after a long and lovely Christmas break, I've successfully handled one week back to school. Before the break, my teaching partner and I shuffled things around a bit. So I am now teaching all of math (rather than half), art, drama/dance, gym, and computers. To be honest, I am thrilled about these new arrangements, since I LOVE art. However, with this shuffling, our schedule has also been rearranged, resulting in a full block (80 minutes) of math each day that I teach. If you have ever spent more than 10 minutes with a 7 year old, you know that that's about as long as you can get them to focus on one thing. So 80 minutes of math is slightly over the top. Thus, I must re-work my planning to include a wide range and variety of activities that are actually math, but don't usually seem like math. The key to working with little kids is tricking them into learning by disguising the learning as just having fun. That's the real challenge.

Anyways, things are going pretty well, and everyone has been really flexible. And I am getting better at two things: a) not having 40 minutes of extra time at the end of my math lesson, b) making up random math activities for the kids to do when I have 40 minutes of extra time at the end of my math lesson... :)

Here are two stories from this week. The day before school started someone asked me if I missed my students. I confidently said no - I had really enjoyed the two weeks off. But, as it turns out, I missed them more than I thought once I actually saw them again.

On Tuesday I went around the room and asked the kids what their favourite part of Christmas was. After hearing about Wii after Wii after iPod after Xbox, one girl, an absolute darling and an only child, said her favourite thing was getting her new kitten, Frost. I was pleased to see that some parents have the wear-with-all to buy something other than expensive, eye-popping, electronics. Later, the french teacher was asking the kids what they had done over the holidays. She asked them whether or not they had played with their families. The same girl asked "Does your cat count as your family?" She's so cute.

Later that day two students came up to me while we were working on art and looked like they had something very important to tell me.

Chris: "Mrs. Sherwood?"
me: "Yes?"
Chris: "James, Ashley, David and me are going to the centre of the earth".
me: "Really?"
Chris: "Yes, when we get older we are going to go to the centre of the earth because it's what we all want to be - I want to be a paleantologist, and Ashley wants to be an archeologist, and - "
David: "But the annoying thing is that I have to carry all the supplies. Because once you go down there you can't get anything, so we have to bring everything we need."
Ashley: "Like big chunks of meat."
me: "Why do you need big chunks of meat?"
David: "Well we don't know what's down there. There might be meat-eating animals so we will just throw huge chunks of meat at them when they try to get us."
me: "I see, that sounds like a good strategy."
Ashley: "And there's hot lava down there."
me: "Mmmhmm....Alright well, I think we've done enough planning for that, and now it's time to get back to work..."

Afterwords I overheard Chris telling another student that he had wanted to tell his dad about this plan but he didn't because he knew his dad wouldn't believe him. I suppose I ought to count myself lucky as one of the trusted few who get to hear about about these wonderfully ambitious, future plans...

Their creativity and curiousity never ceases to amaze me.