Today was: MUCH better than yesterday

I woke up this morning still in a funky mood. When I got to school I said to Miles, "You know, I was thinking this morning that this whole experience is just so stressful and weird. It's like a psychology experiment where you want to see how naturally someone [in this instance, ME] will act in an everyday environment. However, the environment is COMPLETELY CONTROLLED so you won't get any authentic data from the experiment." I just don't feel like I can completely be myself/my own teacher in someone else's classroom.

During Math center time [again, I'm planning and teaching Math at this point] I just KNEW that Miles thought that the room was WAY too loud. And, for a while, I kept running from table to table saying, "Shh! You're being a bit too loud." I wanted to please Miles, and have the room like Miles would've had the room, instead of doing things my own way. AND, when I stopped to look around, I noticed that, yeah, the room was quite loud [at least, louder than it normally is] BUT THE KIDS WERE ALL WORKING ON WHAT THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO BE WORKING ON. One table of 4 boys was playing a memory game [we're going to start a Math chapter on one-to-one correspondence next week] and were SCREAMING every time they got a match, but, they were taking turns and playing nicely together - so, who can complain?

In addition to teaching Math, I also did the morning Phonics/Phonemic Awareness stuff out of the mandated reading instruction program. Today, the kids were introduced to Hattie the Horse:

Hattie is a hungry horse.
She's hungry for her hay, of course.
Hattie is a hungry horse.
She hurries home at noon.

These songs are just SO embarrassing. Like, I know these kids, and I always think that the AlphaFriends songs are TOTALLY insulting to the kids' intelligence, but they LOVE the songs. There is a picture card folder that comes with each AlphaFriend, showing them in some situation where they are surrounded by objects that start with their letter - in this case, H - and Hattie is there on her card with hay all around, hens above her head, and a horseshoe on the wall. I pointed out to the kids that horseshoes are supposedly good luck, but that Hattie would probably have bad luck because the horseshoe in her picture was pointing down, shaped like an arch, instead of hung on the wall like a U [so that the good luck wouldn't spill out]. There are so many spontaneous "teachable moments" in a day...

I ALSO taught a Science lesson today. We talked about TIME [the 4th dimension, not the magazine], with a focus on THE PAST. Thursday afternoon we will continue the discussion by chatting about THE PRESENT, and THE FUTURE. For today's lesson, I asked a bunch of questions about what the kids did when they were babies [in THE PAST], we generated a list, and then they went to their tables and drew small pictures of things that they did when they were younger [on Thursday they will draw pictures of things they do in THE PRESENT, and things that they want to do in THE FUTURE]. Naturally, while the kids were finishing up and bringing their drawings back to the rug to share around, the FIRE ALARM went off - all-school fire drill. Perfect timing - perfectly timed to ruin my perfectly planned lesson! Nah, actually, it didn't ruin things at all - the kids' pictures looked great, and I hung them up on a chart on the wall. After school Miles said that all of my lessons went really well. Today WAS much better than yesterday.