do you know who this woman is?
her name is miss frizzle, and today, she was my savior!
for some reason there was a shortage of substitutes at school today. so i was snatched from my cozy, sometimes hectic, trailer and thrown into the lions' den! no kidding!
here's how the day went down:
around 9:00 a.m. my phone rang. it was the secretary calling to say that one of the classes didn't have a sub and that either my intern or me would need to go cover the class. at first i was okay with that because usually it's just for a little while until another sub can come in.
so i asked, "which class?"
"kindergarten."
that one word has more power than most words i know. my heart started racing, my palms started sweating and i'm pretty sure all the color drained from my face!
i reluctantly agreed to this insanity on one condition. since this was technically my conference time, i had already made plans to run to walgreens to get my prescription. i HAD to get that medicine! i was out of crazy pills and i was about to be sent to one of the scariest places on earth! there was no way i could step foot in that kindergarten classroom unmedicated!
so at 9:45 i cautiously crossed the thresh hold into kindergarten. the aide who had been covering their class was stunned and relieved to see me walk in the door. she was just as surprised to see me there as i was. she handed me this operator's manual for the class and said, "have fun."
the regular teacher in that class is superb. she is very thorough, so her sub note was quite detailed and long, so it was like reading an operator's manual. it was written in one long paragraph, and i kept losing my place! i finally found a marker and had to draw a line through each line of text after i had read it and completed it!
of course no matter how many times i read those great instructions, i still had no clue what i was doing! and boy, were those little darlings quick to let me know when i screwed up! and to make things worse, the "student of the day" was, to put it nicely, less than helpful! wow!
after fumbling through group time, another kindergarten class came in the room with another substitute in tow! we were having a special guest to talk to us about dental health. she was wonderful! the kids really paid attention to her. unfortunately though, she was so good that she just kept going and going and i finally had to tell her that we needed to leave for lunch!
if this were my normal 5th grade class, this little change in schedule wouldn't have been that big a deal. but in kindergarten, it was not good! they didn't like it that we had to leave for lunch without washing our hands!!! so i looked all over that well-stocked room for some hand sanitizer and couldn't find it anywhere! finally i got them all lined up with unwashed hands (wow!) and as we were walking down the hall an announcement came on saying it had started to rain so it would be an inside day at recess.
oh......my......goodness........could it get any worse? do you know what happens when kids can't go outside for recess? THEY COME BACK TO THE CLASSROOM EARLY!!!!!!!! that's right! your few moments of silent bliss get cut short!
thank goodness for miss frizzle! she's the star of the children's educational video series the magic school bus (which i kept calling the magic school house and i got corrected on EVERYTIME). that was recess...watching miss frizzle and her students take a ride on that bus and experience a chemical reaction.
once the video ended i checked the manual to see where we were supposed to be. holy cow!! we hadn't done vocabulary or phonics yet and that was supposed to be done BEFORE lunch. my mind flashed back to the no-hand -washing- before- lunch trauma, and i was suddenly feeling woozy afraid of how this MAJOR change in schedule would affect them this time. so i took a deep breath and said, "it's time for phonics," and then waited.................
whew, no breakdowns. do you know how hard it is to teach a phonics lesson when you are used to teaching children who already know how to read???? i had to pronounce the words very carefully so the kids could hear the final sound and then they repeated it back to me. the strangest thing happened...they repeated the sound 3 times and made these little hand motions for the sounds! of course it took me a little while to catch on, but i decided to give the little motions a try. and of course i did the sound the letter 'n' makes completely WRONG. i was just touching the side of my n...n...n...nose and i was supposed to be running my finger across my n...n...n...nose. it took FOREVER to get through the phonics lesson! vocabulary was much easier, thank goodness!
then it was time for them to go to music! hallelujah! hallelujah! do you know how many strange looks i got when i was walking these children down the hall? you would have thought i was standing there in my underwear! lots of people giggled and stared when they saw me at the front of the line "hippin' and lippin'. " (that's when you walk with one hand on your mouth and the other hand on your hip. it supposed to keep you from talking and/or touching things. apparently i wasn't doing that right either because kids were still talking and touching each other!) at one point in this short trek to music, i turned around and there were only 5 kids in the line! how could i lose 14 children that fast? thankfully they were just walking slower than a herd of turtles and they were all still together.
so i now had 40 minutes of ALONE time. i thought this would be a good time to just relax a little while, but i thought i'd better check the manual to see what was coming next. holy cow! we still had centers, folder stuffing and snacks! i thought the centers would be nice because the kids got to do their own thing and it would be okay for them to make a little noise. WRONG!
utter chaos is what center time is! i had to chase one little boy out of 3 different centers because in each one he either turned the items into weapons or pretended it was some sort of wrestling arena! another little boy who wasn't finished with his work and wasn't supposed to be at centers until he was finished kept disappearing into centers! he was driving me nuts! (this was the 'student of the day'!)
finally at 3:05 i couldn't take it anymore. i just couldn't handle free centers anymore. so i called the ONLY kindergarten teacher who was at school and asked for a video. i noticed that recess time was the ONLY time they were sort of quiet. she laughed and said to send a kid to her room for another magic school bus video.
yay, miss frizzle! my new hero!
i made it through one of the longest days in history, and i was completely drained. my mind just doesn't work fast enough to keep up with 24 kindergartners.
