Friday smiles

I thank God for the moments in my days that make me smile. They make all the difficult moments worthwhile. Today I had several of them, so I'll share them with you in the hopes of bringing a smile to your face too!

For those of you who read my previous post, "Snack battles," you'll appreciate this. Today at snack time, I noticed a student carrying three food items to his desk: peanuts, a pack of crackers, and a granola bar. (Just for the record, this is not the same student who ate his whole lunch for snack.) I said, "You can't eat all of that for snack! You need to choose one thing."
He looked at me dumbly. "What?"
"Yes, one thing."
 More staring. "But my mom wants me to have all of these for snack."
Oh, the good ol' mom line. (I wonder what they tell their moms that their teacher said.) Mean teacher: "No, choose one thing, and put the others back for lunch. You're eating lunch in an hour. You can wait."

This afternoon, I took the class to recess. One of my girls was straggling along behind, and she told me, "I just had my scarf, and now I can't find it." I asked if she checked the Lost & Found, thinking she'd left it out at recess earlier in the day. She explained to me that as she was walking out to recess, just then, she was putting it on, dropped it, and now couldn't find it. I looked in the hallway with her, and it was nowhere to be found. The mystery of the missing scarf. Later in the day, one of the aides brought the scarf to our classroom, so I still don't know where it disappeared to or where it was found!

Writing is always a difficult thing to teach children. You want them to write well, but you can't write for them. Right now, the students are working on writing poems. We first wrote a class poem together about recess. We wrote about the games and activities they do at recess, and then since they have lunch after recess, we ended by saying:
 It's time for lunch. 
I have a hunch we'll eat a bunch.
We discussed how having two rhyming lines at the end is a good way to close a poem, so I encouraged them to try to end their poems with some rhyming words. As I was conferencing with students today, I realized that, interestingly enough, many poems about trains and thunderstorms and such were ending with lines about it being time for lunch and eating a bunch.

I still smile when I remember meeting with one of the boys. His poem was about a train, and his (non-proofread) poem read:
Chug, chug, chew, chew goes the train. 
The train doesn't have blood vains.
So I was trying to help him come up with some rhyming lines that made sense. His one line was, "The train is here." So I asked, "What rhymes with here?" and gave him some ideas: near, fear, dear... This was the line he came up with: "Here comes my ear." He immediately dissolved into giggles, and I couldn't help but join in! In fact, I'm still giggling. I was so glad for that moment with him, because most of our one-on-one moments are not lighthearted!

And lastly, in Science today, we read about "States of Matter." Immediately when I said the topic, one boy piped up, "Like Ohio?" And then again at the end of the lesson, when I said something about the three states of matter, this same boy said, "Oh, I thought for a second that you were talking about real states!"