Well! Here I am! Finally sharing with my world my newest adventure. I don't really know where to begin. For so long I was trying to figure it all out in my head before I verbalized it and then I was just trying to find the time to blog!
For the first one, I will start with just student stories. These were usually people's favorite part when I was in Ghana. For starters I have a small class of 12 students. It was 11 but one little boy just joined us yesterday! Never been to school before. I have 5 girls and 7 boys. Some are quite the handful, but I am pleased to say that they are all coming along just fine. It was a hard few weeks but they are starting to do much, much better.
I had bought a new dress on Sunday and wore it on Monday. During calendar, one of my sweethearts shouted out, "Miss Roberts, I like your dre"... but I stopped him and told him if it wasn't about calendar he needed to wait until recess to tell me. The minute we stepped onto the grass for recess, he came up to me and said, "Miss Roberts, I like your dress." I smiled and asked him if that was what he wanted to tell me during calendar and he smiled and said yes. <3
One of my girls that catches on quickly to the learning hugged me one of the first weeks and said, "Mirss Roberts, I don't want to leave kindergarten. I want to stay here with you." She is also my sweetie that raises her arms open wide and sings, "This little light of mine" on the playground every day.
One of my smarties who was in preschool at our school last year and is very far ahead of the others in the class was working with one of the lower students because they are two that can work well in a group. They don't tease each other. Well, the little boy took the cards he was working with and threw them all over the floor. The smartie looked and him and goes, "oooo, that's not niiiiice." haha! You tell him, girl.
For awhile I had three sassies in my class. They would not behave, at all. I cried during their specials one day it was so bad. Well, a few days later, the behavior was still continuing and I took one of those students and I wrapped her in this HUGE hug and told her that I loved her and that she was sooo smart and I knew she knew how to behave better than she was showing me and I just kept hugging her and telling her how much I loved her and that she was such a good girl when she wanted to be and on and on and on and on...This went on for about a minute, maybe longer. When I was done, she just looked at me, jaw dropped and sat slowly where she was supposed to be. Haha, right after she had been yelling and running around, and coloring on things she wasn't supposed to. It was night and day in a matter of 60 seconds. It was hilarious!
A few days earlier, the same girl was in trouble for something and I moved her clip down on her behavior chart. She started pouting and told the boy next to her, "teacher ugly" haha! I didn't let it show I heard her. At least she was upset that she got in trouble! and then she was quiet, we moved her clip up for behaving, and she was fine.
This is also the same girl that shortly after she had gotten in trouble for something and we were reconciling our differences, she walked with me to lunch and asked if she could carry my water bottle. I asked her why she wanted to do that all the time. She told me, " because you're pretty." hahaha love it.
My new student as of a few days ago is not a talker. Very quiet, very much in his own world. On his first day of kindergarten I was showing him how to use a crayon. When he put it to the paper and started coloring blue, he looked at it and he just gasped he thought it was so neat. Highlight of a day right there. Then after lunch, he cried for 45 minutes because he was still hungry, but couldn't use his words enough to tell me that. Still, precious. Also, same boy who had a melt down today because he was hungry. He went to the counselor's because he wasn't calming down for me or my assistant. When she brought him back and he saw me, he got this huge smile on his face and held out his arms for a hug. Adorable!
I found out how creative my kids are. We are struggling a lot with cutting. It is a difficult skill for many of my kids but one I feel is important enough to keep practicing. So we do a lot of academic art projects. We did sequencing with The Three Little Pigs today. They were to cut out three heads and three houses. One of my sassies who thrives when we do art cut out his heads and glued on his ears and then glued something else on the bottom of the pig's head. I saw it and told him he only needed two ears on each head. He looked up at me and said, " Those are feet!" I laughed. It was so darn cute. And creative! That's a big step for many of my kids.
More about my school to come.
