A few funny things...

Today was a long day. I was at school for 12 hours again. Yikes. Then I had to carry a kicking, screaming, and crying little boy out of the classroom and into the front pick-up area after school. I then had to hold him on my hip, while he screamed in my ear, until his babysitter came to pick him up, for fear that if I put him down he would follow through on his threat to "run away from school." Why the fit, you ask? It was all because he did not want to go home from school because he was going to have to go to ballet class. Granted, I don't blame the kid for not wanting to go to ballet. Talk about social suicide for a first grade boy. But still, really with the drama?

Anyway, good thing is that at least I have had some pretty good laughs the last few days to get me through the tough times. Allow me to share them with you...

There is a special boy in my room (mentioned above), who for the sake of this blog we will call Jake (concealing his real name for obvious reasons). He has discovered that a girl in my class lives on the same street as him. If you know Jake, you know that he thinks that this means they are obviously meant to be. He has a serious first grade crush on this girl. Yesterday we were sitting in line at the bathroom and the girl got up to get a drink of water. Jake, of course, subsequently asked to get water as well. I told him that he could, and the next thing I know, I turned around and saw the funniest thing ever: Jake leaning over, nose buried in the girl's hair, with the most disturbing pleasant look on his face. His eyes were closed as if it were heavenly, and he was inhaling as much of her scent as possible. It just reminded me of a creepy old man or something. Come on, in first grade??? Where do they learn this stuff.

Another 'Jake' story. Today I had some spare time at the end of the day so I went over to my bookshelf to grab a fun book to read. All of the kids were sitting on their squares on the rug watching me. I grabbed what I thought to be a cute, lighthearted story with a good moral - A Bad Case of the Stripes. If you know this book, you know that it is in no way "scary." So I grabbed it, spun around, and said "Do you guys want to read this book?" I held it up. Jake freaked. He threw up his hands out in front of him as if he was fending off evil spirits. He lunged backwards, eyes closed, screaming "Not THAT BOOK! Not THAT BOOK! AHHHHHHHHHH" He crawled on his hands and knees out my door, yelling about how scary the book was. When I walked out into the hall to retrieve him, I forgot that I still had the terrifying book in my hands. Thus, he thought it was chasing him. You should have heard the commotion. Heck, if you were anywhere in a 10 mile radius you probably did. I threw the book back in the room and assured him that we were not going to read it. It took me 10 minutes to get him back under control. I still don't know what is so scary about the book.

I went after school to give the Kindergarten teachers a hard time about it. I asked them why no one had bothered to inform me that 'Jake' is terrified of the book. They almost peed their pants from laughing so hard. Apparantly last year the same thing happened, after he had only spotted the book on the bookshelf.

One more small story: We were working on filling ten frames with numbers 0-12 in math today. One little boy does not even know how to count (which is very frustrating, since he is already repeating first grade). I was working with him as one-on-one as possible considering I was teaching a class of 22. The girl that sits next to him has a speech impediment and is hard to understand. She was trying to help him as well. Finally, frustrated, she yelled out: "Deese pids dote know how to pount!!!"

Translation: These kids don't know how to count. It was just very funny and slightly ironic.

Have a great last couple of days of the week!