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." 

Chuckie??? And purple dinosaurs (I'm not talking about Barney)

This is one of those "Wha??" stories...

I was sitting outside with the kids before we transitioned to nap time. We were just talking about movies and whatnot, then one of the kids said, "I watched Chuckie at my house." I said, "Wait, what??" And she said, "Chuckie." I told her, "That's scary. I don't think you should be watching movies like that. You're too little to be watching those kinds of movies."

One of the other girls were sitting with us and she was shaking her head in disagreement. She says, "Chuckie mataron senores con cuchillo." (Roughly translated: "Chuckie kills/murders girls with a knife." OH MY GOODNESS. I had to tell them, "We don't talk about those things at school. Those movies are too scary."

Just LOOK at him.

Why on earth would you want to expose your little child to something as horrendous as CHUCKIE?? It boggles the mind. I don't know how those kids sleep at night.

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We have these purple dinosaurs in our playground that look just like these:

One of the children walked past a dinosaur while it was bobbing back and forth (another child was probably riding it or just got off of it). You can guess what happened... the kid got hit on the head by the mouth of the dinosaur and started to cry because he was startled. 

He came over to me and asked for an ice pack, "The dinosaur hit me right here!" pointing to the left side of his head.

and then he put it on the right side of his forehead, and I said, "I'm sure it was an accident." Then I looked at where he had the ice pack and I said, "Wait, I thought it was on the other side?" So he slid the ice pack to the left side of his head.

A minute later, he stopped crying and said, "I feel better now." The area was just a little pink and I said, "I want you to keep this on for just a little bit longer." I thought he would just sit on a bench or something, but he got up and started walking. I asked where he was going and he said, "I want to apologize to the dinosaur." I told him, "But the dinosaur hit you, you don't need to say anything to him." So he didn't :) 

God, kids are funny.

You don't know me!

I really need to get this off my chest!

We had a sub in our classroom and he has a very dry sense of humor and more sarcasm than I care to deal with (and I consider myself a very patient person).

The kids were trying to finish some turkeys that they were making for Thanksgiving, and being that the last day of school is tomorrow, we were trying to crank them out ASAP!

While it would be nice to send the turkeys home in time for the holiday, I also knew that Thanksgiving would go on without them, so I wasn't in a panic.

I'm giving the sub instructions about cutting the feathers, body, feet, etc. and I list off the students who have not completed the project yet. Then I say, "If we don't get to all of them, then I guess they just have to wait until Monday to bring the turkeys home." He started laughing and said, "I mean, it would be nice to have it for the holiday for their parents. I know you don't care because you're not a parent or anything. But, as a parent, I would like to have something like this. I like this kind of stuff."

The audacity!!!!!! I was appalled. Fool, you don't know me!! I would risk life and limb for my kids, without a doubt. Rather than waste my energy being upset, I let it go. There are some things in life that just aren't worth raising your blood pressure for. And this man was one of them.

OK, I'm done venting.
Thanks for listening to my ridiculousness :P

Quotables about poop and yellow hair.

1) One of the kids was compelled to tell me all of this before he went to bed:


Child: "Teacher, I went poop in the bathroom and got poop on my hands."

Me: "It's okay, it was an accident. Did you wash your hands though?"

Child: "I wiped it with paper towel and then I washed it."


2) Background info: So my class is primarily of Hispanic origin. About 80% of them are native Spanish speakers, and only half of them can fully understand English. Two of them have light brown hair (very handsome boys!), but none of the children have blonde hair.

"No one in our class has yellow hair, right? Only yellow blankets."


3) Another child rushes to the restroom and looks very puzzled. I said, "Go use the bathroom," and he said, "There's too many bathrooms." We have two toilets and he couldn't decide which one to use :/

L-O-S-E-R Like Me!!

Thanks, Chels, for this blog title LOL


If some folks are familiar with that Fox show "Glee," they had an episode where they wrote their own lyrics to a song called "Loser Like Me." Here are a couple of lines:


"Just go ahead and hate on me and run your mouth
So everyone can hear
Hit me with the worst you got and knock me down
Baby, I don't care
Keep it up, and soon enough you'll figure out
You wanna be...
A loser like me"


I have a student who is particularly difficult. He is very aware of the choices that he makes, he knows what he needs to do, yet he chooses the path that isn't always best. Here's an example:


He's squeaking around on the bike track with his trike and I yell out, "Room 1, line up please." Most of the kids start running toward our classroom to line up, but he's still squeaking around on the bike, as if he didn't hear me. 


I continue to watch him, and he is aware of this, but he's still going. I repeat, "Room 1, line up please." Again, nothing.


So I finally jump in front of his bike to obstruct his path, put both hands on the handle bar, bend down so that I'm in his face, and I say with a firm voice, "Park the bike right now, we're done."


He says, "But I want to..." and I interject with a "Park it now" and I point to the bike parking lot. [He was going to tell me that he wanted to finish his lap before parking it. In other words, he wanted to park the bike on his own terms.]


He heads over in a huff, but he stops in his tracks, turns to me and says, "When I see you, I'm not going to smile at you or be happy to see you." I said, "Fine. Just park the bike."


YES. This is the student who called me a loser.


Here's how it went down!


We're sitting in circle and I'm starting to call students so that they can go wash their hands for lunch (we have lunch in our classroom). But, to sit in circle, the kids need to sit "criss cross apple sauce, hands on your lap." 


The rest of the kids are sitting with their legs crossed, but not him. His legs are sprawled out right in front of him, he's chillin'. Everyone else is done, but he's still sitting there. I say, "I'm waiting for you to sit criss cross applesause. I know you can do it, I've seen you do it before." Nothing. So I say, "Fine, you can sit there until you show me that you can sit nicely." So I'm doing my own thing and trying not to look in his direction.


He calls me over, "Teacher! I'm sitting nicely now!" And I say, "Good. Now I want to see if you can stay like that." After a series of leg-straightening and crossing, he finally stays cross-legged. I sit down right in front of him and say, "See, I know that you can sit nicely. Now I want you to sit like that all the time. You can go wash your hands now." 


AS SOON as I finish saying that, he takes one of his legs and straightens it out, then he says, "But I'm not sitting criss cross applesauce." OKAY. I said, "Just go wash your hands," again in a firm tone. He stomps off and washes his hands. VICTORY! I think...


I'm putting some beds down for nap time and I hear a voice, but I'm not sure where it's coming from. I hear, "You're a loser." I couldn't tell if it came from the bathroom or from the tables where the rest of the kids are eating and talking, so I brush it off. The next voice is clear and distinct and I know it's coming from the restroom, "Teacher Em... (in a teasing and inciting melody)" I turn my head so that this child and I are looking eye to eye, "you're a loser." WOW.


I walked over quickly and told him, "You DO NOT talk to me like that. You don't talk to anyone like that. That hurt my feelings. I'm going to have to talk to your mom." 


"I'm sorry. I said I'm sorry. No, don't do that. I'm sorry."


"I heard you say sorry, but I'm still going to talk to your mom."


QUIET. He drags himself to the table for lunch and he's sulking. But, come on, you can't talk to people like that.