A Good Week

First, the weather here mystifies me. It's finally summer ish. The temperature is typically around 70 degrees when I leave for school. There's pretty good humidity, so it's almost a sweat to walk to school. By afternoon recess, I have the chills and it's closer to 55 degrees. Not bad, but when I prepare for 70, I get a little miffed. This has happened everyday this week.

For the last month and a half, I've heard of almost nothing except fire fighters (and of course the word, "angry"). Because of this, I organized a neat field trip to the fire station. We got to walk through a pretend fire drill in a house - ducking low, covering your mouth for smoke, feel the doors to see if they're hot, all that good stuff - we put out a virtual fire with a real fire house, toured the museum, played computer games and of course there were fire trucks. Since the trip, my elves have been even more infatuated with firefighter games.

After school, two of my elves ran up the staircase outside my classroom yelling, "Come everybody! Fire!" They of course were running TOWARDS the 'fire' in order to put it out, and insisting that everyone come with them. This is a serious concern of mine. In the event of a fire I am 159% positive that my students will be running TOWARDS the fire, either to try to put it out or to see the real firefighters in action, instead of away from it. Not good. In order to get them down from the staircase, I told them there was a fire on the basketball court. They came running down the stairs and started spraying their hoses through the fence and onto the court. THey were of course slightly mortified when moments later the basketball team started their practice on the court. There was renewed yelling of, "Be careful!!!!" and "FIRE!!"

That same day, one of my elves found a good-sized snail right out on our porch. One of my other elves gently reached out and touched it's little head. The snail of course immediately retracted its head inside it's shell which made all of my elves giggle with delight. The first elf then gently reached down and picked it up. Then, before any of us could do anything, an infant little brother swatted the snail out of her hand, and promptly and forcefully stepped on it. RIP awesome snail :(

The second best thing in class, after firefighters, has to be the dinosaurs. I read a dinosaur book today, and one of the dinosaurs was supposed to be very fast. I asked my elf if she could run faster than the dinosaur. She replied, "No running, I walking." I guess the message that walking in the classroom is the only acceptable form of moving from one station to the next is finally sinking in!