Diary of a preschool teacher

As a part of Joel at So You Want to Teach?’s Blog Revolution Project, I am tasked to write a post in the form of a list.  Try as I might, I could not think of a title that involved a list.  I like the ‘diary of a preschool teacher’ title, anyway, and think it could be a regular feature.  Anyway, with a nod to Joel, here is the subtitle of today’s post:

5 THINGS THAT HAPPENED TODAY IN MY CLASSROOM:

1. I taught my kids how to wash their hands.  These are preschoolers, remember, so I do see children licking their hands and wiping their noses without benefit of a tissue.  Washing hands is a big deal to me.  Today A. came out of the bathroom too quickly to have washed his hands, and prevaricated when I said, “Did you wash your hands?”  I said, “Can I smell them?” and when he said no, sent him to wash.  Then, in morning meeting, I acted out how to wash hands (get hands wet, get one squirt of soap, do NOT wash it off immediately but instead rub your hands together and make bubbles, rinse, dry) and they were fascinated.  All morning long kids kept coming up to me saying proudly, “smell my hands!” and I got to smell lots of tiny, soap-scented hands.
2. We had a visitor.  We always have a visitor.  At least she wasn’t here to see me, and I didn’t have to perform my trained monkey routine.  She was from the autism program, here to observe Miss L. to weigh in on her placement for next year.  Everyone knows Miss L. is not autistic, but Ali is trying to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s in her attempt to get our girl into a regular ed kindergarten with an aide.  It was interesting watching the autism evaluator interact with Miss L., who was very friendly and chatted away.  She was able to identify different facial expressions that the evaluator made (“that’s mad….that’s confused….now you’re happy”) and she even asked the evaluator questions about herself.  Not autistic, clearly.  Now if we could only figure out what she IS.
3. We discovered that it was M.’s birthday on Friday and we missed it!  Don’t know how I managed to do that, but since M. is barely verbal most days, it is understandable that she never mentioned it.  Today she got her birthday crown and we all sang to her and she was happy.
4. We learned a song about frogs.
5. We started learning about numbers again.  I discovered that O. can name the numeral 8!  Whoo hoo!  He also knows 1, 2, and 4.  But he still can’t rote count “one two three four five”.  He gets stuck at four.  I’ve got Z., who can count well past 100, and then I have my special needs darlings who are working on the first five numbers.  Well, we’ll just have to keep working.