You HAVE to be kidding me

This morning started out with my outside duty aka watching the children before the bells ring to ensure they don't go totally crazy... My boys were telling me all of these stories about snakes... yup, snakes... Totally my favorite subject... However, despite the topic I found it was a great way to start my day, hanging out with my kids before we had to get serious about learning and school. It was nice to be on their level and get to know what interests them. Then came the disappointing news, despite it being BEFORE school and about 7:57am we already had a kid who had been in trouble… AND had been sent to the office. I tried to let it go and hope that today would get better but I should have known then it would go on to set the tone for the day. The kids went off to art and it seemed we could forget the morning drama and move on to a great day… NOT… We had to have a talk with the kid that had already been to the office… Let’s call him Jack; well Jack isn’t exactly putting his best foot forward everyday. There is most definitely room for improvement. After we talked to him the Crew headed outside to do our Crew initiative for the day, which was “string shape”. String shape is basically 21 pieces of string, one per kid (we had one absent) and they have to make a shape with the string and be able to stand inside it. But of course, there is a twist! We have “rounds” of this game and every round Scott or I would take away strings! So of course then there is sharing and collaborating involved and forced upon the children. It forces them to listen to each other and to hold each other accountable by ensuring they are inside the shape with BOTH FEET… It ends up with one 8-foot long string and all 21 of them… The task is to not fall out and to make sure everyone is there. Now according to our handy dandy teacher guidebook it says everyone should sit down and put his or her feet in. I totally disagreed with this but went along with it anyways... thinking they could simply all squish in… When they had played through and failed twice Scott and I gave them 2 minutes to talk it out, with the same leading questions “What worked, what didn’t work, how will you change it, where were you in all of this?” Then insanity ensues… THEY ALL TALK AT THE SAME TIME…. Finally, one listens to another and it catches like wildfire before they realize they have the answer… sit down! So Mr. A wins this round with his super smart book… But I shall be right too someday… maybe… well hopefully. Minus one little more incident with “Jack” the morning went smoothly. I taught a mini-lesson on nouns, adjectives, and verbs then set the kids loose to create a list of them. Then Scott and I taught the kids the magic of haikus.

Yes, you read that right.
We gave our kids THE haiku.
Haikus are true blue.

It was so much fun to see them struggle through working with syllables and ensuring they had the right form. 5-7-5… Simply magic. After lunch we did a mini lesson on book genres because today was THE day… THE day Scott and I have been talking about for weeks… Classroom library day… Now in our heads this played out in a well organized, contained mess kind of way… In reality it was more like a book bomb went off and we let our kids put it back together… We let them brainstorm how they would organize the books while we, the ADULTS in the room, dumped the books on tables. It’s right about now I realize, all that “let your kids be independent” talk I had heard was about to become real. We were not going to take part in anyway with this whole classroom library thing. They were going to do it all… Hold on, IS THAT A CELLPHONE RINGING?? YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW… NO WAY. NO PHONES IN SCHOOL. Yup, let’s call this kid “Jake” received a text message right about now in the day. Scott and I were not happy as you can imagine. Cellphones have not only been discussed before with “Jake” but it is school policy that they remain OFF, or SILENT in backpacks… So why exactly his was ON and making NOISE was so beyond me. You better believe I took that cell and started marching my way to the office… Except that, well, you see… I couldn’t get it to stop making noise!! Yes, that’s right, me a child of the golden technological age had trouble turning off an 11 year old child’s cellphone. Finally about half way to the office I got it off. There is nothing like the silence knowing you’ve turned a kid’s cell off... Seriously, everybody, right now, go turn a kid’s cellphone off. Straight up, it is a step towards adulthood. Anyways, when I returned Scott and I watched the kids take our classroom library from totally disarray to utter beauty. Categories like “series books, science, math, food, vehicles (*Right Scott?)” It was so cool to watch them get there. They were rewarded by being taken to our school library to see how it was organized and to check books out... All I can say is some kids might have Beiber Fever but our kids have Book Fever.