Fee-fi-fo-fum!

When I put out the word that I needed help with a Jack and the Beanstalk costume, I had not one but two offers of help. "Of course! This looks like a fun project. When do you need it by?" Umm, next week. (Did I mention I am lucky to have The Most Awesome Friends a person could ask for? Though, they do serve as enablers of my personal brand of insanity . . .)

That's right. It's costume time again. Family Literacy Night is Wednesday night, and the theme this year is fairytales. Each room will offer a fairytale read-aloud and an associated hands-on activity. I did some fast thinking and snatched up "Jack and the Beanstalk," to be paired with stalk measuring and seed planting activities. Mmm, science and literature. My favorite!

Mrs. D (Mistress of Procurement that she is) procured green and brown paper for fashioning said beanstalk and snack-size plastic cups for seed planting. Almost done. . . . Then our principal mentioned at the faculty meeting last week that she was expecting everyone to be in costume for this event. Uh, oh.

Google to the rescue! I found this kids' costume and figured it would be both inexpensive and "quick" to make a Ms.S-sized version. As I was pondering where to acquire green beanstalk tights at this time of year (Is there a season for opaque green tights?), I suddenly remembered that I already own a very old pair of green tights (having kept them way beyond any obvious usefulness). Even more impressive, I was actually able to locate them! Savers vindicated, once again!

"If it's somethin' weird and it won't look good, Who ya gonna call?"

I turned to a friend (dare I say, just as crazy as I?) who dressed her family as the characters from Charlotte's Web for Halloween. Having fashioned from tights Charlotte's octo-legs and Templeton's tail, she qualifies as an expert. With what should I stuff them, dear Liza, dear Liza? 

"You can have my stuffing. Come quick! I'm home alone! (and I'm supposed to be cleaning.)"
Ah, timing is everything. The choice between beanstalk production and house-cleaning is clear!

I rushed over, green tights in hand, and--after a few unpublishable jokes and a longer-than-I-care-to-admit period of time cutting and sewing tights--I am now the proud owner of an almost-there set of beanstalks and a brown burlap Jack tunic.

Note to self: Shirts have seams, and seams consume fabric. Oops!

Long Term Investment

"Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Maria Montessori would have agreed vehemently with this statement. She believed that "Establishing lasting peace is the work of education," that changing the way we educate children is the key to a peaceful future. Peaceful problem solving will probably never be on The Test, but it will be evident in the citizens we raise to shepherd our future.

This afternoon, I sat on the stoop outside our building with a child who had dissolved into loud, angry tears. Angry feelings are OK, but loud, disruptive noises in the classroom are not. I quietly reminded him that I was ready to listen to words when he was ready to use them--and then waited. A fifth grader came out to empty a bucket of dust rags and dirty water from their Friday classroom cleaning. He asked what was wrong with the child, and I explained that he was angry and why.

The fifth grader nodded knowingly and said to the child, "Come here. I have something that will help you with your anger." (No kidding: those words.) My second grader walked over, and the fifth grader gently and patiently instructed him to take one of the wet rags and squeeze as hard as he could, dripping the water into the bucket.

This simple scene illustrates so much of what we're trying to accomplish in Montessori programs. This is why we group the children together with multiple ages--so that the older children can serve as role models, providing wisdom and leadership for the younger children. This is why we work so hard at peaceful problem solving--because one day they get it! And that will make all the difference.

Know when to fold 'em!

This month's pen pal letters are letters and envelopes in one! Using an origimi letterfold technique I learned passing notes in middle school (Mrs. D claims never to have done this), we folded the letters into envelopes.

Testing. Testing. Testing . . .

We are in the midst of six long days of Stanford testing. Too long.

Having repositioned all the desks into rows has me feeling discombobulated, and reading script after testing script is numbing my brain. But I've had some time to contemplate the "stuff" teachers find themselves doing, completely outside the realm of assigned duties.

Today's was a doozy. As I administered the Listening portion of the test, rushing around to check that each of 26 first graders bubbled something (and just one something) next to the appropriate question number, Mrs. C gestured urgently in the direction of one of the children. I looked over and then desperately wished I hadn't.

The child had vomited all over himself and his test booklet. Every year during the TAKS, I live in fear of this moment: vomit on a test booklet. A puke test must be bagged, tagged, and reported as a testing irregularity. And someone (I prayed it was not me--turns out it is the Testing Coordinator) must transfer the child's bubbled answers from the barf booklet into a non-barf booklet. (And you thought that someone who threw up on a test booklet would be finished with testing? Naive little pretties.)

The other children remained surprisingly calm. ("Can you hear me now?") I, however, have the gag reflex of a mama bird. Trying very hard not to make a bad situation worse, I summoned a monitor from the hallway who kindly took the child to the nurse and then buzzed the office to let them know we needed a custodian, stat! Moments later, as I attempted to wipe off the worst of the yuck with giant wads of paper towel, our heroic but somewhat harried Testing Coordinator swept in with The Bag in which to preserve the puke test. (Is there performance pay for that?)

After the hubbub subsided, we took a brief break, regrouped, and soldiered on.


Note to self: Do not become a testing coordinator--EVER.
. . . Do you suppose there is a Chief Officer in Charge of receiving the state's vomit tests?

Chicken Soup with Rice

In January
it's so nice
while slipping
on the sliding ice
to sip hot chicken soup with rice.

Sipping once
sipping twice
sipping chicken soup with rice.

Happy New Year!

Today, we marked the new year by constructing 2010 with golden beads. As we did so, we skip-counted by tens to check our accuracy.





It is dramatic and fun to solve the problem of what to do when we come to the end of our thousand chain. Now what? This year, it was a first grader who got that “Ah, ha!” look on her face and suggested we borrow a second thousand chain from the classroom next door.




We also enjoyed lessons on A.D. & B.C., the history of the Gregorian calendar, and the months' names.

The year I completed my Montessori training was the first year that required a second thousand chain. This year, we added a ten bar. It’s hard to believe that much time has passed. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I celebrated “the new millennium” with college friends in Boston, hoping that the Y2K Bug would not obliterate civilization as we knew it.

The first graders I worked with that first year are now 16! Those little people can drive! Abby, who, one cold winter day, dissolved into tears because her mother made her wear her “Puffyman Sweater.” And Taylor, whose zipper got irreparably stuck after he zipped himself—knees, arms, torso, and all--into his hoodie jacket, so that only his feet and head protruded. (We had to use scissors to release him from the jacket so that he could walk again!) Anna and Katie, who cheerfully worked non-stop, writing lengthy stories and completing volumes of research. And Julio, whose reading took off after we reeled him in with non-fiction books on topics like sharks and big cats.

Surely, they have no idea how much they taught me.

I told you once
I told you twice
all seasons
of the year
are nice
for eating
chicken soup with rice!
--Maurice Sendak


What We're Reading:
Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months by Maurice Sendak

Say it ain't snow!

What is this mysterious "Winter Storm Warning" of which you speak?

Issued by The National Weather Service Houston/Galveston, TX 9:55 am CST, Fri., Dec. 4, 2009
... WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 8 PM CST THIS EVENING...
SNOW IS FALLING OVER MUCH OF SOUTHEAST TEXAS. AS THE UPPER LEVEL LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM NEARS THE AREA PERIODS OF MODERATE SNOW WILL BE EMBEDDED IN THE WIDESPREAD LIGHT SNOW. THE SNOW WILL CONTINUE INTO THE EARLY EVENING BEFORE ENDING. TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 0.5 TO 1.5 INCHES CAN BE EXPECTED... WITH ISOLATED TOTALS OF 2 TO 4 INCHES.

Crazytown!

What We're Reading:
The Biggest, Best Snowman by Margery Cuyler
The Biggest Snowman Ever by Steven Kroll
Runaway Mittens by Jean Rogers
The Missing Mitten Mystery by Steven Kellogg
Tacky the Penguin by Helen Lester
The Snow Tree by Caroline Repchuk
I'm in Charge of Celebrations by Byrd Baylor

Rough around the edges

I'll admit that when we first discussed this Pen Pal Project and Ms. C suggested having the children make envelopes, I thought in my head (but didn't say), "That sounds like an unnecessary extra step--a whole extra afternoon of scissors and tape and cutting and folding and wasting LOTS of paper. We can just put all the letters in one big envelope." However, I was suckered into the envelope-making industry as soon as I saw the looks of anticipation on my students' faces as they opened their envelopes and pulled out those very first letters from their pen pals. There's something special about getting a letter in an envelope . . . instead of on a Post-it or in an e-mail or a text message.

When I found the homemade envelope tutorial, I was hooked--no tracing templates, no cutting, no wasted paper. All good and so very clever. Then the second round of letters from our pen pals arrived, and I knew we were in trouble. I have met my match in Ms. C! We made envelopes by reusing magazine pages. She kicked it up a notch with envelopes made from old key map pages!




Uh, oh . . . . This could really get dangerous.





What to do? Our letters were due to be placed in the inter-office mail and I didn't have enough full-page magazine photos. I love the way scarcity is so often the mother of new ideas. When I pulled out the ink brayers (for a printing project--and a craftastic afternoon with Franny), I found a big bag of naked crayons in the bottom of the box. With my mind already on fall leaves (my mother scooped some up on a trip to someplace cold and tucked them into the pages of a book), those crayons got me thinking about leaf rubbings. It was only a hop, skip, and a jump to using up some of that tractor-feed printer paper that Mrs. D keeps trying to get me to throw away and those broken, naked crayons to make beautiful, beautiful envelopes. Plus, a fabulous question appeared in the Great Questions Book: "Why do leaves change color?" Oh, boy! Letter-reading, letter-writing, art project, fine motor practice, science lesson--all in one! Integrating subjects and multi-tasking learning! In education circles, it's trendy to propose posting the learning objectives for each day on the wall, but I think I'd have to make objective wallpaper. If we're only hitting one objective, we're not using our time efficiently.

So we're branching out! (Pun intended--Blame my father and his entire clan of groan-inducing punners. Bad genes, bad. Seriously, it's a frightening thing when he and his cousins get together.) First, we reviewed the rules of safe collecting in the field: Collect in ways that are safe for you and respectful of the habitat in which you are collecting. (And don't run with scissors!) Off went the children, gathering leaves from the far reaches of the playground. Now, despite my efforts to dispute the idea that we don't have seasons (we do!--Right now, we're in the thick of "acorn season," which closely follows cicada season and is easily outdone by Oak pollen season), it is true that we are not subject to the dramatic mood swings of nature experienced in cities farther from the equator. Most of the leaves we collected were still green.



Inside, we divided the leaves into trays--one for each Cooperative Investigation Team, along with a cup of naked crayons--and got to work.






The results were phenomenal!










Not only did the children create stunningly beautiful envelopes, but crayons rescued our day. We finally found peace. Ahhhh. The incredible soul-soothing, smoothing powers of art.

It was one of those days . . . frustration, tears, too many needs that couldn't all be met at once, long lines in the cafeteria, a series of interruptions. We just never found our flow. A wise teacher once told me, as I was about to embark upon my first year of teaching (more than ten years ago!) that every once in a while, an afternoon of coloring with crayons is OK if that's what it takes to finish "one of those days" without harming children's bodies and feelings. I've never had to resort to a simple afternoon of coloring, but she was right about crayons. Crayons certainly smoothed the ruffled feathers of our day.


What We're Reading:
Leaves by David Ezra Stein
Simple Science: Leaves! by Vivian Fernandez
Why Do Leaves Change Color? (Let's-Read-And-Find-Out-About Science) by Betsy Maestro

A Great Book for Adults:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows--A novel told entirely through a series of letters.

A baby!

A baby! This little one snuck in on some cut flowers brought in from the garden by our Beautiful Classroom Manager. Oh, the excitement of this new addition to Room 28! Like most babies, this new little life spends its days eating and pooping until . . . but we watch anyway, with rapt attention.

Remember to vote!

As a preschooler, quietly coloring my way through coffee-infused League of Women Voters meetings, I was instilled with value for the democratic process. Not voting is the thing most likely to make my mother haunt me after she is gone. Since the time when I stood at eye-level with my mother's skirt while she pulled levers in a velvet-curtained booth on the stage of our neighborhood high school, I have understood that voting is both a right and a responsibility.

So I feel compelled to pass along this message to the young people with whom I spend time.

It helps that our school cafeteria is a polling place. The children are either asked to eat in the classroom or eat silently in the cafeteria, depending on the whim of the week. To help them understand why, we hold an election of our own, right here at "Precinct 28."

We begin with an election the way it might have been held when our country was newly independent. Each child receives a role: "You are Mr. Powell, a wealthy Catholic landowner." "You are Nancy, a slave on a tobacco farm." "You are Jonathan, a footman for the wealthy Crump family." "You are Mrs. Anderson, a widow who owns her own farm." A long line of citizens, not qualified to vote, are turned away from the polls. It makes an impression. (Of note is that elections were not by secret ballot in those days. Voters were often required to announce their choices aloud for the election clerk to record . . . while the wealthy and influential members of the community stood by, watching--and listening.)

Next, we talk about how voter qualifications have evolved during our country's history. To vote today, you must be over 18 and a citizen of the United States. We've come a long way, baby! To illustrate this change, we hop into our time capsule and fast-forward to a 2009 Kids' Favorites election.

Every citizen of Room 28 receives a Voter Registration Certificate and excitedly lines up at the polls.

The children sign in and vote by secret ballot.

After the ballot is proudly placed in the ballot box, each voter receives an "I voted today!" sticker (cleverly procured for the occasion by Mrs. D, Mistress of Procurement!).

Interestingly, one of our second graders suggested literacy as an additional voter qualification. "You also must be able to read." Hmmm. True, one must be able to read in order to be an informed voter. However, . . . I wondered if there was a law about this "on the books." When I went to vote this evening, I asked the Election Judge. I'll leave it to you to do a little digging to find out the answer yourself! Happy voting!

What We're Reading:

Granddaddy's Gift by Margaree King Mitchell

VOTE! by Eileen Christelow

Election Day (Rookie Read-About Holidays) by Patricia Murphy

Duck for President by Doreen Cronin

If I Ran for President by Catherine Stier

So You Want to Be President by Judith St. George

Pencil Amnesty Day

"Do you remember what Monday is . . . ?" Mrs. D asked as we packed up the last of the Fall Festival fun.

I thought a moment . . . Hmm. Election Day is Tuesday . . . "Oh! Pencil Amnesty Day!"

If you are a teacher of young children (or maybe even older students), then you know: Pencils are a problem. After years of experimentation, I have finally come up with a solution. At the beginning of the year, I can be found skinning a sliver of paint from each of close to one-hundred pencils. (Honestly, it passes the time during some of those start-of-school in-services and makes me feel as if I'm doing something to prepare for The First Day of School.) Each child receives four pencils, with his or her name written with Sharpie in the bare-wood window. (At first, I tried writing directly on the pencil with Sharpie, but that too easily rubs off. Hence, my maniacal peeling of pencil paint.) Why, you ask, would you do such a thing?

Well, first there's the "I don't have a pencil!" and the "Hey, that was my pencil!" and the "_______ took my pencil!" and the "I don't want to use this one. It doesn't have any eraser left," and then the "Whose pencil is on the floor?"--"Not me!"

Sometimes you just need your very own tools. So everyone gets their own, and everyone is responsible for managing their pencils. If you break it, you are responsible for placing it in the "to be sharpened" cup. If you rub the eraser to a nub because you like the way those wormy little pink erasings look or you use your teeth to crimp the metal ring so that the eraser pops out whole, then you who must live with the inconvenience an eraser-less pencil. (Before you judge me as a queen of mean, know that each child also has his/her very own big pink eraser. I fully acknowledge that making mistakes and correcting them is an important part of learning.) If a pencil is left on the floor, it's easy to discover its owner. If an adult absentmindedly wanders off with a pencil, borrowed from a child's desk, they recognize it as ours and return it.

But here's the biggest benefit of not sharing pencils among children: Sometimes pencils get really gross. We're talking don-the-gloves, get-the-roadkill-bone-plucking-pliers, HazMat gross. Think of what this pencil's petri dish could culture! No one else wants to use a pencil that's all beaver-chewed and slobbered upon. So pencils are personal. If you want to gnaw on your pencil until it's rodentia-raided, destined-for-a-dam* disgusting, be my guest (though I do worry about the pencil paint that some children must be ingesting!). It's yours . . . and no one else has to touch it! (*a beaver dam--My own mother thought I had misspelled a word here!)

Though Mrs. D is willing to admit that I've successfully solved the pencil problem, she also thinks I'm pencil-petty--stingy, even. "They should be more responsible with their pencils. We gave them FOUR," I argue. But Mrs. D is a pencil pushover. "They NEED new pencils," she pleads. And thus, Pencil Amnesty Day was born. As part of my gift to Mrs. D, every year on her birthday, we celebrate Pencil Amnesty Day. Everyone (regardless of how responsible--or irresponsible--s/he was with the originals) gets brand new pencils!

Happy Pencil Amnesty Day! (Bet that's not on your Hallmark calendar . . . )