Day 4: Kindergarten and 3rd grade

I was not at school yesterday, so when the kids arrived this morning, some asked, "Where were you yesterday?" I was kind of touched that they'd noticed I was gone. I doubt they realize I won't be there after Friday.

One thing I've noticed this first week of school is that when teachers talk about the rules, they often say things like, "When we walk down the hall, do we talk loudly?" (in other words, they say what the kids shouldn't do to illustrate the rule). I keep wondering whether they are just giving the kids ideas! LOL

Math went OK today, but we did have a funny thing happen. We are learning to count to 5. The teacher asked the kids to sit in a circle and then count up to 5 and begin again. They did OK the first time around. Then, she asked the person who said "3" to stand up when they said the number. Well, that changed everything! Kids got so confused. Almost no one stood up when we got to 3, and often, the next kid would start with 1. The teacher and I could not figure out why this kept happening, and we were trying SO hard not to laugh! At recess, we were talking with another one of the K teachers, and she had the same problem.

In the class I've been in, today we had our first walker at recess. He got in trouble for mimicking the teacher and then lying that he'd done it.

In the afternoon, I got to teach a 3rd grade class for an hour while their teacher attended a meeting. We talked about what made a good sentence: starting with a capital, putting a space between all words, writing neatly, and ending with a punctuation mark. They then wrote a sentence and then we used the document camera to show the sentence of each child on the screen and we decided whether the sentences met those rules. Well, one kid refused to write a sentence. I kept telling him that the assignment was not optional. Once we started sharing the sentences, he finally wrote one. But, when we got to him, he refused to share. At this grade, the kids switch classrooms (one teacher does ELA for both classes, and the other teacher does math), so this was the other teacher's kids. When I started to walk out and get his teacher, he relented and shared. But, wow! I haven't seen that much defiance in many classrooms.