Like Roses

The above is the answer. The question, on the other hand is: Sometimes, what does the lesson you pull out of...you know where...smell like? I was not prepared to come back to school. During the holiday I finished my unit planners in order to be prepared for the authorization visit next week, but that was the end of my productivity. I figured I'd stay after our PD half-day on Sunday and get shit done, only things didn't go down that way and after we started with a bang, in which our principal announced that the grand inquisition was, in fact, a witch hunt, and he, as the witch, has been asked to leave, no one was feeling particularly productive.

And part of me kept telling myself you are not prepared you are not prepared you are SO NOT PREPARED FOR TOMORROW AND YOU ARE GOING TO SUFFER FOR IT!!! but I'm not very good at listening. Yesterday morning found me scrambling to figure out what to do with my year two classes (I had to cancel my KG's in order to get some errands run). I decided during my sporadic bursts of holiday productivity that I would finally finish my soft sculpture unit now, and that way only one of my classes would be taking up space with sculptures at a time. When last we left off, the kids were going to be making soft sculptures with socks, and since they've never sewed, I'd do a sewing project, making a "secret keeper." I wanted to do something really cool, and have them cut out shapes and sew them together, but in the end, I just had them fold a rectangle into a smaller rectangle. Since I seem to have lost my hole punch, Olga and I drilled the holes with scissors for them, while they decorated it, inside and out. It was simple, but the kids really enjoyed it, and they are learning planning skills, so it turned out better than I'd anticipated.

I should have learned my lesson yesterday and gotten more prepared for today's KGs and my year one class, but there's just something about having your principal sacked when you know it's not right and he's about to be replaced with Atilla the Hun that sucks the life out of you. Oh, and also I was planning to be at school at 6:30, since I no longer have a reason to wait and ride in late. However, I forgot that the alarm I'd set yesterday was only on a "repeat once" and so I was a little shocked when I woke up at...ummm...6:15. So I got here an hour late and, oh yeah, on the way got a text to let me know I was subbing, and it turned out to be 70 minutes of my least favorite year 2 class. Blerg.

Luckily I didn't have to give a lot of thought to what I was doing. I had ideas...I just didn't have them as refined as I wanted. The KG2s are doing a unit on health and good habits, so we made sculptures of little people that they could pose for doing different exercises. The kids really loved moving them, and it was nice to do something besides painting. KG1 is starting a unit on songs and rhymes. I think this is going to pose a real challenge for me...they don't actually know what songs they are going to be performing, and I'm not sure exactly where to go without knowing that. Today I introduced the idea of making art based on a rhyme. I used, "Ring Around the Rosey," which I had to teach to one class, and asked them what the song was about (no, I did not tell them it was about the plague!) I had to guide them into talking about roses and posies, and asked if we could make a flower, and that's what we did. After making the flowers - which was challenging for them, but they really liked - we talked about the fact that we could use the flowers to show what the rhyme meant, if we were going to perform it.

Not bad. Now I just have to figure out what I'm doing next.

In Year One, we are starting our printmaking unit. I didn't have ANY sort of printing materials ready, but luckily the unit is also focusing on teaching portrait/landscape/still life, and I went with that. They inquired about what different things a picture could show, and I taught them the vocabulary. Then I had a series of slides that they had to guess which genre they were, and we finished by passing out paper and crayons, with the instruction to draw something that would fit into one of the categories, and that their classmates would guess which one it was. Before teaching it, I kind of felt like it was a crap lesson, doorknob teaching (okay, that it was), but they really got into the guessing, and really got into making the different kinds of art. At the end they had a strong understanding of all three categories and were excited for their next art class. So all in all, not a bad day.