Kiwi, binoculars, and Polar Express!

I realize that I haven't posted in a while... I've been trying to finish up classes and took my last final today! What a relief :)

This was adorable:

We were having lunch, and instead of the usual bananas, oranges, or apples, we got KIWIs with lunch! What a treat!

One of the kids bit into a kiwi and said, "It's so sour. It makes my face go like this." So he shuts his eyes really tightly and makes a squished face. I wish I could have taken a picture of him so that you knew what he looked like.

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Kids are so creative. We have these multi-colored blocks that come in rectangles, triangles, and other cylindrical shapes. They have magnets on the ends of them so that they can be connected together and stay in their place.

Common themes are airplanes, cars, a house... This girl decided that she could use her's to "see things." I asked her what she saw, and she said, "Mickey Mouse and Christmas."

I told her that they are called "binoculars." So adorable. Gotta be one of my favorite pictures of all time.

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This one takes the cake. I want to make sure that you are sitting down so that you can handle it!

I start singing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" with the kids, and here this boy comes in and he says, "That's like Polar Express!" "Yes, " I say, "like Polar Express?" 

"Yeah, except it's a bigger train! A BIG, BIG TRAIN!!" His eyes get really large and he's holding his two hands up to show me that it's BIG. At this point, he's practically yelling because he's so excited. Okay, got it.

We keep singing the song, and he can't get over it, "It's a bigger, BIGGER train!" then he starts turning his arms like the wheels of a train, "Choo, choo!" 

So he says it again, "It's like Polar Express, except a BIGGER train, MOTHER F***ER!!"

Oh HECK no! "I don't EVER want to hear you say those words again!! Those are not school words, do you understand??"

I was totally caught off guard. I wonder where he got that from?

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Lastly, I had an issue with a student (the same student who called me a loser, the same student who wouldn't park the bike. :/) and he would not stop talking during nap time. He kept talking to people across the room and totally disregarding the sleeping people around him. HOW RUDE!

So after moving his bed, reprimanding him, and verbally threatening to bench him during play time, I finally said, "I need to talk to you outside. This is not okay." He gripped his bed tightly and shook his head "no." 

I told him, "Can you walk over there by yourself or do you need me to help you? I'm going to count to three and if you're not up, I'm going to help you. 1-2-3." He sat up at "3" and sluggishly trudged over to the door. He looked like he was near tears, but I wasn't going to take it!

We got outside and I asked him what was going on. No answer.

So I told him, "When it's time to play outside, you can sit on the bench until you're ready to talk to me. But no playing until you talk to me." That got him talking right away. 

Then I said, "When you go inside, what are you going to do?"

"Sleep."

"Good idea. I want you to go straight to your bed, no talking. If you're talking, that means you don't want to play outside."

"But I do want to play outside."

"Then stop talking."

He went right to bed. That was a victory for me because I really thought I lost him. Thank goodness for perseverance. 

I'm ready for happy hour. LOL.

Tracing fun & dinosaurs dying :(

The kids traced my silhouette onto the blacktop:

Please take note of the delicate features around my face, the absence of a chest, and the lumps and bumps where my stomach is supposed to be :P

One of the kids walked up to the drawing and he didn't see the other children tracing me. He said, "Teacher! Look! It's a ghost! Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!" LOL 

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Earlier today, I was reading the book "How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food?" It's a great book to get kids to think about their manners, especially when they're eating (it's available in English and Spanish!). Instead of using children, they use different illustrations of dinosaurs (and they're beautiful drawings!)

We got to this page and it asks "Does a dinosaur throw his spaghetti high in the air?"

I read the line, and a boy said, "Look, the dinosaur is dying!" and he was so concerned. I said, "That's just spaghetti sauce. He'll be fine." The kid insisted, "No, he's dying!"

The teddybear cracked his head and ate foot-flavored cake.

I really need to think of more creative titles without giving too much away...

Anyhoo, more pics to share! I'll post in chronological order:

1) Sergio* (not his real name, duh) recently celebrated his birthday and he was SOOOO excited to give this to me.

I walked onto the school site and he took me by the hand, saying: "Teacher, come here. I want to show you something." He's guiding me toward the classroom, and I ask, "Is it in the classroom? Let's wait until later because we're playing outside right now."

"But I want to show you now," he says, in the most sincere way possible (not bratty at all).

"When we go inside, you can show me, okay?" "Okay," he said, sounding defeated.

As soon as we walked in, he said, "It's in here!" as he pointed to the refrigerator. He knew that  only teachers could touch the refrigerator, so he just pointed.

I opened it up and what did I see??? I most beautiful, lop-sided cupcake! The yellow frosting slid halfway off the top and it sat all by its lonesome in the cupcake tray. I exclaimed, "Is that for me??"  He had the biggest, proudest grin on his face and he said, "Yeah!" I told him that I LOVED yellow :) and he beamed.

And those cupcakes taste even better when the kiddos give them to me ;)

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2) Moldy something.

We were going through an old stash of paint and we found this at the bottom of the box:

I'll let you decide what you think it is...

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3) Strawberry. Platano. Foot.

We were in the sandbox making "cake" (the kids like to watch me pretend to eat it. They like the chewing noises that I make :P). Francis* brings these three "cakes" and I ask her what flavors they are, "Strawberry cake, platano cake..." and what's this one? She says, "Uh, foot cake." Mmmm, foot-flavored cake... LOL too funny. I wish you could see her, she's just adorable.

Top: Strawberry

Middle: Foot

Bottom: Platano (banana)

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4) The kids had cinnamon teddy grahams today for snack with some milk. Two of the cookies were stuck together, so Carlos* told me, "Look, there are two together" as he tried to pry them apart. He wasn't successful at keeping the bottom one in tact, so he said, "Teacher, the head cracked off."

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5) (No pic for this one :/)

We're shifting from Fall to Winter, so we were asking the kids why they think the leaves are falling down. We wanted to get them to talk about it being so cold, the leaves changing color and falling off, and how animals want to move somewhere that's warmer.

They were able to recite and recall "hibernation" and "migrate," except for one student. We were juggling back and forth between the two concepts to make sure that they could distinguish between the two, so we asked, "When birds move somewhere warm for the winter, what is that called?" Ally* said, "Migraine!" even though I think she meant to say, "Migrate." I told her to make sure that we could hear the "t" sound at the end, so she said, "migrate."