Is There "peanut dutter" in Your Land? - 05/16/19

A few days ago, I gave a presentation to the first graders about Hong Kong. Since then, I have been getting a lot of questions about Hong Kong. When one of the first graders misspelled "peanut butter" as "peanut dutter", this prompted the young lady next to him to ask me if we have "peanut dutter" in "my land," which of course, was referring to Hong Kong. I told her we have peanut butter, but not peanut dutter. She wasn't nearly as interested in our peanut butter as she was our peanut dutter, which is understandable.

When I arrived in kindergarten this morning, a girl turned to me and said "I love you" and I didn't know how to respond, so I just shot her a quick smile and looked back at the teacher. She then said "hey! I said I love you!" and then I kind of panicked and just looked at her and awkwardly said "thank you." It is flattering and very endearing that they tell me they love me, but I just am not really familiar with how to appropriately respond to that. Kindergarteners are really funny in that, if one person starts laughing, the whole class starts laughing. There is kind of a lag when the whole class starts laughing, because some don't process what was funny for a while longer than others. Ms Crucitti asked a little girl if it was her mom or dad chaperoning on the field trip, and the girl responded that it was her dad. Ms Crucitti then said she would need to change the name tag because she thought it was the mom coming, so she put "Mrs. (their last name)". The little girl then blurted out "YOU CALLED MY DADDY A MRS HAHAHA", and the rest of the class bursted into laughter after about 3 seconds. During recess, I had two girls pulling me around the playground and calling me their "mama", which I again didn't really know how to respond. The discomfort wasn't so much from being called "mama" as it was from knowing how to respond without encouraging it. I kind of feel like, if I were a mother, I would feel a little sad if my child was calling someone else "mama". That said, they were so adorable and I'm sad that I only got to spend 3 days with the little ones. It was a memorable 3 days, though.

In first grade, Anna and I were taking groups of 2-3 students at a time to interview them about our time and experience in first grade. We were mostly asking them questions that we are supposed to answer in our blog, because we thought it would be interesting to hear what we've been writing about them from their perspective. I haven't had the time yet, but will put together the video clips over the weekend. Interviewing first graders is really challenging! A lot of the interviewing was really awkward but really funny, and I think we will be able to put together a pretty entertaining blooper reel. Anna had the idea to ask the question "did we surprise you?" and then have one of us try to surprise them by sneaking up and scaring them. It worked on some and didn't work on others, but they got a real kick out of it. We told them not to tell their classmates to ruin the surprise, but we found out they were giggling and whispering about it to each other after they got back to their classroom. The sweetest moment was when a student was asked why he liked having Proctor students visit his classroom, he said "it's because you guys are my best friends."


In Mrs. Peters' class, they just finished their last day of testing, so I was hanging out with them during free time. I got to channel my inner child once again and do word searches and coloring. A few of them asked me to write them letters, but to write exactly what they were saying. I wrote every word that they said to me (including the "ummm" and "wait no! I didn't mean for you to write that I was just thinking" and the "stop writing everything I say!"). They thought it was really funny. It was also kind of funny how they treasured the letters so much and held onto them until the end of the day.

After school, I was teaching my last class of gymnastics at AEMS. I think I can safely say that I have gotten a lot better at controlling them. I've realized that a really good technique is to just "ignore" the troublemakers, because a lot of the time, they just like the attention they get for doing what they're doing. Of course, with a sport as high risk as gymnastics, I'm not really "ignoring" them, but I stop telling them off unless they are doing something unsafe. The fact is that all of them are there and really want to do gymnastics, so if they aren't getting any attention for not listening, they eventually figure that they should just stop what they're doing and do gymnastics like they signed up to do. Surprisingly, it usually only takes them a few minutes to realize it. The girls were really good today. They worked hard, were engaged, and enthusiastic. I let them pick their own warmup games and how much or little time they wanted to spend on warm up games. I figure that this is their class, and they should be in charge of their own learning, with my leadership. Anyway, I had 3 just about hitting handstands on her own, 2 that are really close to their backbends, and 2 starting to work on back handsprings. The levels are pretty staggered but I think it works well. There's a good variety, and they're really good about helping and supporting one another.

I walked 5 of my AEMS gymnastics girls over to the hub for girl scouts afterwards. I know it seems like a silly thing, but I felt so adult-y being responsible for walking 5 little girls down the street, even if it was only from one building to the next one. We were walking pretty far off the road, but even just walking through the carpark and across the grass for that 2 minutes, I was super on-edge and made sure I could see them all at the same time and that they were all together. Fortunately, we all made it there in one piece.

My last gymnastics class at the hub was also today. Paige and I worked more on handstands, and I was so, SO overjoyed today that she reached her goal of doing a handstand, from standing, without my help. I know how incredible the feeling is of getting a new gymnastics skill that just a little while ago, you had no idea how to even begin. Paige and I started gymnastics lessons about 6 weeks ago. I've taken a video of her progress every other lesson, and it's amazing to see the transition (watch the video!). I was happy to see that she was also really excited about getting her handstand. There's another proud parent moment - or maybe proud teacher, I should say - for the books.

Time: 10:45
Hours: 8
Total Hours: 129