Kidspeak, Episode 1

Teaching kindergarten (and any other grade, really), I hear thousands of (usually unintended) hilarious comments and conversations every week. I decided to attempt to document some of these gems here. Who knows? If my students continue to be funny enough, I may even publish a book one day!

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Last week, I was reading a book about Easter to my class, and the author described The Last Supper as one of the events leading up to Good Friday and Easter Sunday. I briefly explained that this is why we celebrate Communion, and that when they are in second grade, they will get to eat the bread and drink the wine...

Child C: (raises hand) Miss L? Is it RED wine?
Me: Yes, it is....
Child C: (grinning from ear to ear) Oh GOOD! I can drink that kind!!

Guess white wine gives him a headache...? :)

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I'll be back with more Kidspeak, as I'm sure my students will keep the material coming!

I'm officially on Spring Break after our one day work week! (Tough life, eh?) My interview is today, so send good thoughts/prayers/vibes! Happy Wednesday!

Dear Spring, Where are you?

Well, here we are...another snow day. On March 25th. 5 days into this season where the weather supposedly warms up, plants grow, and the sun comes back out. Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. Argh!

(That said, there is a very little amount of snow out there, and canceling school seems a bit unnecessary. But shhh, don't tell my principal I said that! I'm perfectly happy to stay in pajamas on the couch!)

We have one more day of school this week, and then we're off until next Tuesday. It's generally known as our Spring "Pause" since it's a mere 4 days, instead of the 6+ most schools around here have. But, no matter, I'll take it! When we get back, we're in the home stretch to summer vacation - crazy! 7.5 weeks left after this pause!

Speaking of the end of the year, I have an interview on Wednesday for a primary position at another Catholic school. Fingers crossed it goes well and/or more open positions pop up soon! I am planning to spend today preparing for the interview. (And I also have big plans to clean my apartment and spend money that I don't have at the mall near me...but I just want to buy summery clothes! It'll help spring realize that it's supposed to be here...right?) This school looks great, about 10 minutes closer to me (in the opposite direction) than my current school, but very similar demographics and feel. I love my current school, but there are no open teaching positions for next year, sadly. I need to get back to a full (true?) classroom position, as opposed to latchkey and After Care. So, job applying and interviews, it is!

Although it doesn't feel much like spring, we have been learning about the season and its holidays! We have been tracking lion and lamb days this month (grr...last year, this would have been a much more pleasant exercise...), we learned about and celebrated St. Patrick's Day, and currently, we have been learning about Easter and making Easter crafts.

We made pictures to depict the saying "March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb." (Although, I may have to explain again that this isn't always true. Refer to snow day on 3/25.)

Here is part of the class display. I love imperfect (non-cookie cutter) kid art! I also like having the kids cut out the sayings (We did a similar project at Christmas.) to reinforce word order and left-right/top-bottom orientation.

(Of course, I found this idea - and tweaked it a bit - on Pinterest.)

We also celebrated St. Patrick's Day this month. I read books about St. Patrick, his legends, and why we wear green and look for leprechauns and shamrocks on St. Patty's Day. (I highly recommend both of those books to teach young children the background of this holiday!)


We sponge painted shamrocks, after the kids mixed their own unique color of green, experimenting with different amounts of blue and yellow paints. These looked great on our windows!

We were also visited by a few pesky leprechauns, who turned over chairs and desks, spilled our dress-up clothes, and smeared frosting all over desks and the floor! We think they felt bad about the mess, though, because they did leave us some delicious shamrock cookies, green frosting, and green sprinkles!


(Also, hunting for leprechauns? Oh, my goodness, were these kids into it. In After Care, we had fourth graders sending clues and leading the hunt - without any prompting by us - it was really sweet to see them trying to get the little ones so excited.)

Found this through one of the teaching blogs I follow (Emily at I Love My Classroom) and here's a link to the printable. These were so easy (and cheap!) to make. It's nice to remind my students that I love teaching them and feel very lucky to know each and every one of them! I plan to do this next year, no matter what grade I'm teaching - I think older grades would love this little treat also.

And that about sums up March in my room! I'll be back soon to share the Easter project we've been working on. Looks like some of our other Easter crafts will either be skipped or postponed until after the big day.

I'm off to enjoy my snow day, prepare for the interview, clean, and shop! Happy Monday, all! If this is your last week before Spring Break, you can do it!!

Currently!

Look at me! 2 posts in 2 days. Maybe I'm getting the hang of this blogging thing?

I'm linking up (a week late...) with Oh' Boy 4th Grade for the March Currently! Here's what I'm up to tonight.

Listening - Well, it was a rerun of Parks & Rec, but this took me so long to finish that I'm now listening to a rerun of The Office. In any case, Parks & Rec is one of my favorite shows, and The Office was my favorite show for a good 4 years running. I haven't seen it in years, but I'm happy to report it's still pretty funny!

Loving - Trader Joe's brand foods. Enough said, am I right? (Seriously, if you haven't tried these almonds, go buy them. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.)

Thinking - A 4 day week with a break in the middle of that week? Yes, please. A girl could get used to this.

Wanting - Summertime. Warm weather. Swimming. Bathing suits. Sundresses. Flip flops. Again, enough said.

Needing - Yeah, it's 9:15. I should make something for dinner soon...

Like/Love/Hate - My name starts with an L (clearly), so I went with Like: Lamination (um, what teacher doesn't?!), Love: Laughter (I couldn't survive without it!), Hate: Lying (from students or peers - it's not ok! It frustrates me more than almost anything else.)

I hope you enjoyed stopping by my blog! What are you up to currently?

Snow Day! (Updates, Jan Brett, St. Patty's, and Lent)

Well, hey there. I guess I'm not too great at this blogging thing, but seeing as we FINALLY got a Snow Day today (first one in 2 years!), I thought I'd stop by and show you what we've been up to in 2013!

We have been busy this winter in afternoon kindergarten! Here's what we've been doing:

We learned about snowflakes and how each one is unique and special - just like each of us! We made two different kinds of snowflakes: one using foam cutouts and glitter glue and the other, using a paper template, glue, and glitter. I think we can take these down now that we've gotten our snow day!

We made a class mural for open house. I found the kid clip art on TpT (free!) and had each child select a picture that resembled him/her and color it in. Then I outlined a mural, and each kid got to paint a different section. The word bubbles have the reason that each child said they love St. Jude! We got a lot of compliments during Open House on this.

I share a birthday with one of my students, which was very fun! He made me cookies, and we celebrated together. We are exactly 20 years apart. :)

We had a beautiful 70 degree day at the end of January, and the kids were thrilled to be outside in short sleeves! (I may have been even more thrilled than they were... Unfortunately, I think the groundhog lied, seeing as how it's now March, and we have a snow day...)

Here are some of our Valentine activities:

Sorting and counting Valentine's M&M's. We also created patterns from the different colors. And yes, they got to eat the M&M's when we finished!

We made Valentine's Messages in a Bottle (found here on Pinterest). The kids chose people to receive their messages, and we included Valentine's M&M's in place of sand/seashells. We even made a secret delivery to an older sister's classroom on Valentine's Day!

We estimated how many candy hearts would fit onto a picture of a larger heart, then counted to see how close our guesses were.

 We worked in pairs to sort candy hearts by color and individually graph our results.

President's Day: We made the cutest reversible George Washington's and Abe Lincoln's. One side of the craft is Washington's face and coat, and the other side is Lincoln's face and top hat. I found this craft here and adapted it for our needs.

We have still been making plenty of time for play!

A sunny and cold day earlier this week afforded us some play time outside. Here, the girls became fascinated with a sewer on the playground. You don't know fun until you've dropped sticks (and Cheetos found on the ground - ew) into a sewer!

These awesome Melissa & Doug toys had been in the Staff Room for months, until I was encouraged to bring them downstairs. The kids love to mix the train and bus with our jungle animals set. The jungle animals have traveled to some exotic locales!

 Dramatic play fun with some of the dollhouse toys!

We have also been studying Jan Brett, one of my favorite authors and illustrators. My kids went to the school library on Monday, and almost every one of them checked out a book by Jan Brett, completely unprompted by me! I love that! We're going to continue our author study next week with Tomie DePaola, followed by Eric Carle and Chris VanAllsburg. If you have any other kindergarten-appropriate suggestions, please let me know! The kids are creating their own author study book, where they record their favorite book by each other, a reason for liking the book, and a picture to illustrate the book. I think this will be a great kindergarten keepsake and hopefully, will help their parents select library books over the summer months.

Also up next on the agenda: St. Patrick's Day! I think we're going to sponge paint shamrocks. We've been out of green paint since we created the mural for Open House (see above), and rather than grabbing some more from the supply room, I think we'll do a quick color mixing lesson, and I'll let each child mix his/her own ratio of blue and yellow to create a unique green color. I think this will make the shamrocks even cuter on our windows!

As we're a Catholic school, we have also been learning about Lent, Easter, and the story of the Cross. I will check back in later this week or next week (no, really, I PROMISE) to show you a beautiful book I found that describes the Stations of the Cross in a child-appropriate way. We also made "stained glass" crosses (see picture on right). I need to take a picture of the finished crosses in the window. They are beautiful! If you're a Catholic school teacher, what have you been doing to teach your students the importance of Lent and preparing for Easter?