I’ve been meaning to tell you all to buy It’s Not All Flowers and Sausages, the new book by Mrs. Mimi, the author of the It’s Not All Flowers and Sausages blog. She is a teacher in NYC who loves teaching but maybe not some of the people she meets in the course of doing her job.
She is hilarious, and so is the book.
And any teacher (like me) who works with nice people will read it and feel incredibly lucky.
Go out, people, and buy this book!
This morning I put on my lovely new red coat and went out to meet the buses as they arrived. When bus 3 came, I caught Cherry and Chutney as they got off and had them wait with me. When all the kids were gone, the driver got off, and I told her that I was their teacher, and that we were there to apologize to her for their behavior last week.
“Cherry, please repeat this after me. I’m sorry I stood up on the bus.”
Cherry hung her head. “I’m sorry I stood up on the bus.”
“I’m sorry I wouldn’t listen to you.”
“I’m sorry I wouldn’t listen to you.”
“I’m sorry I used bad words.”
“I’m sorry I used bad words.”
“It will never happen again.”
“It will never happen again, ” Cherry promised.
I went through the same routine with Chutney, minus the part about the bad words. The driver at this point was looking really surprised and also pleased. I don’t think she ever meets her bus riders’ teachers.
I found out her name (let’s call her Maria), introduced her formally to the girls, and explained that it is her job to keep them safe. It is their job to be respectful to her, and to listen to her, so that she can keep them safe. I said that their behavior last week was unacceptable, and if it ever happened again, Maria would let me know and I would give them a consequence in the classroom.
I held their hands and we went back to class, talking excitedly about our third reading of Knuffle Bunny. I am hopeful that we will not have a repeat of that behavior. They really are smart and wonderful girls.
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At centers time Cherry chose the reading corner. She read and re-read Knuffle Bunny out loud; she has memorized the whole damn thing. I think I need to call her mom and compliment her — she’s the mom who told me that when she found out she was pregnant, she started buying children’s books, and now Cherry has FOUR HUNDRED books at home. You can tell this is a well-read child.
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Plum was absent, so I guess she really was still sick yesterday. Zucchini had a wonderful time in blocks today, and no pee accidents. He kept building towers and showing me — “Look, cylinders! And this is a cylinder, too!” My new student wore a coat to school today. The room was clean, but when Zucchini opened the block shelf it was a disaster (I, in my usual anal-retentive way, have a specific place for each block to go). I suppose I will have to visit Miss Mellow’s class again to explain how to clean up the blocks, as I forgot to mention that yesterday.
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We finished the day with our third reading of Knuffle Bunny, where the children reconstruct the story and tell it to me, and then we got to watch the video, using my video data projector. It was wonderful, and a great way to end the morning.
We walked to the library today for preschool storytime. When I had the kids on the carpet in our room to remind them about walking safely, holding hands, crossing the street, and all that, Cherry raised her hand.
“We can listen to the cars say ‘RRR!’” she said. (We learned the /r/ sound this week, with a story about getting in a race car, turning the key in the ignition, and hearing the engine go “RRRR”! The hand motion for R is turning a key.)
“You’re right, ” I said. I’d never had a child make that connection before. “We can listen for cars going ‘RRR’. We can also look for the letter R and the other letters we know on signs.”
So we started walking and pretty soon they were seeing S, M, A, R, and T everywhere. (Yeah, somehow the letters I’ve taught them so far spell out SMART. That was totally unplanned, but wonderfully appropriate.) I have never had a class like this one. They really listen to what I teach them, and then they talk about it while playing, or walking, or drawing.
We got to the library in plenty of time, and my class was beautifully behaved, as usual. The story theme was monsters.
I crossed my legs (the grownups were in chairs) and Pumpkin noticed my foot near him. He turned and gave me a beatific smile.
He held my foot lovingly for the rest of storytime.
And when we got back to school, I gave them a long recess and everyone pretended to be a monster.
Mo Willems has a new Elephant and Piggie book out! I think I might just have to buy it today.
There is a new Elephant and Piggie book out — I cannot wait to read it!
We are learning about Transportation now, and my bookshelf is full of books about trains, planes, buses, boats, and cars. Of course we have a Donald Crews shelf — with Truck, Freight Train, and Sail Away on it.
Princess finished her journal page this morning, then took Freight Train off the shelf and brought it to me.
“Teacher, what does this say?”
“Freight Train,” I told her.
“fff,” she said, pointing to the letter F.
“Yes, that’s right, that’s the word Freight. Freight starts with F.”
“Duh, duh, duh, ” she said, pointing to the D.
“Yup, that’s D. D is for Donald. Donald Crews wrote the words and he drew the pictures. And you know something else about Donald Crews?” I asked.
“What?”
“He has brown skin, just like you do.”
“I LOVE this book!” she yelled, and clutched it to her chest.
On Monday one of my students came in halfway through the morning. “I thought it was spring break starting today,” explained his always-harried mother.
“Oh, no,” I said. “That doesn’t start until next week. It was in the newsletter I sent home on Friday, and it’s in my monthly calendar.”
And then it dawned on me that this was the third time I had reminded her that all the school dates she needs to know are in my weekly newsletter. Maybe she isn’t disorganized, I thought….maybe she can’t read.
The week previous, a mom had come to school with some formal papers for her to sign so that her son can get speech therapy at school. The speech therapist and I had been waiting all week for those papers to come back to school. When she came in last Friday, she was holding the papers.
“I’m just kind of confused,” she said. “Could you explain this to me?”
I ended up going page by page, summarizing each one and explaining the process to her. It occurred to me that perhaps she couldn’t read them. She is very young — had her first child (the one in my class) at 15, and has had two more since then.
I’ve talked to the social worker, and she will call both moms and ask how things are going, and are they happy with the way they get information from the school? I’m not sure what else to do, except call those mothers personally when there are things they really need to know.
As a book lover, though, I think it is indescribably sad.
Update — April 3.
I’m rethinking my position on the first mother. I’m maybe back to thinking she’s just really disorganized. Yesterday she told me that her son has been using our special words, and that he had said “disappointed” at least five times over the weekend. (She was grinning with exasperation.) I don’t remember talking to her about the words, which means she read the letter with the list of the three words. Maybe.
Yesterday flew by in a rush, and I never got to story time. So today we read On Monday When It Rained, and I put three words on our new Word Wizard poster:
First, though I did a vocabulary pretest. I gave the children trays to use as lapboards, and papers numbered 1-6. By each number there was a happy sun picture, and a sad cloud picture. I said, “If this sentence makes sense, circle the sun. If it doesn’t make sense, circle the cloud.” Then I said six sentences, like “When my mom said we were going to the cool new playground, I was excited.”
The whole thing was crazy. I felt like the assessment itself wasn’t very developmentally appropriate. These guys are FOUR and they’ve never taken tests before. Understanding if a sentence made sense was hard enough, but figuring out how to fill out the sheet was really hard. Miss Slinger was trying not to laugh, and I was trying not to cry.
However, I’m still glad I did it. When we read the book, we talked about what those three words mean, and how we’re going to keep track of every time we hear someone using those words. We’ve already got four tally marks on the poster (Miss Slinger: “I’m so disappointed that you are making so much noise in the hallway. Oh, thank you for being quiet. I’m so excited that you were doing such a good job listening to me.”) And at the end of the week, we’ll do the post-test, and I can see if we’ve made any growth.
I need to figure out a good way to measure if children have learned a particular vocabulary word. Any ideas?
So, have you ever tried to discuss books with a class of urban four year olds, and found that the only emotion words they know are sad, mad, and happy?
We read Farmer Duck today for the second time, and so this time I wanted to ask what the secondary characters were thinking and feeling. “How did the other animals feel, when they saw Duck was ’sleepy and weepy and tired?’” I asked.
“Sad,” they all said. No one could say much more than that. I had to do some modeling of a think-aloud: “Well, I’m thinking that they must be pretty upset. They love the duck, and they probably think it isn’t fair for the farmer to stay all day in bed. They could be feeling frustrated with this terrible situation.”
Then when I asked them, “What is the farmer thinking right now?!” on the page where he wakes up to find the cow, hens, and sheep under his bed, bouncing it around, and making loud noises.
“Sad,” they all said. WHAT?! I couldn’t get more than that out of them, so finally I told them, “You know, if I woke up all of a sudden and my bed was bouncing and there were farm animals in my room and they were yelling at me, I’d be really CONFUSED.”
I have decided that we will start studying vocabulary in a more intentional way, and that we will start with emotion words: upset, angry, proud, excited, worried, embarrassed, confused. Definitely confused. I’m going to pick books that deal explicitly with moods and feelings, and pick three words each week to highlight and post on the Word Wizard poster I just made this morning. We’ll write the words on the poster, refer to it daily, and record each time we hear someone using one of the words, or we ourselves use one in conversation.
Maybe in a few weeks our book discussions can go a little deeper.
I dare you to read this book to your students (or your own children) when you are having a bad day.
There is no way it will not cheer you up.
