Well, we made it to Christmas break! My kids were super crazy today. But we survived. Our morning routine was thrown off because we had to move the bells over to church before school. My 6th graders who ride the early bus headed over there with their bell teacher while I watched her 1st and 2nd graders.
I kind of forgot about the two girls who ride the late bus. When they got to school, they unpacked their stuff and then studied their memory work (probably thinking I was running an errand and would be back to the room soon). A few minutes before the bell rang, they came down the main hallway, looking into all the rooms, "Have you seen Miss Heintz?" It's nice to know I would be missed if I disappeared.
All of them did their homework! Yesterday, a few had some late assignments and I told them they wouldn't get to open presents if they had unfinished work. I pulled the same deal with the 7th and 8th graders (except they wouldn't get to watch the movie in the afternoon). Man, the late work practically dove into my mailbox!
After memory work was said, we did a skit of the Christmas story for religion. Next year I'm definitely finding a script. First, we had to list the characters. Then, we had to assign parts. One of the boys wanted to be Mary. I said no. We ended up drawing sticks and people got to pick their parts. None of the girls wanted to be Mary if a boy was going to be Joseph, but eventually we all had our parts. And chaos broke loose. Everyone was running all over the place, pretending to be barn animals or a baby or I don't even know. They were diving into beanbags, running to different corners... it was a mess. So I told them that if they couldn't handle doing a skit, we were going to work out of our religion books.
Ugh. I should have just made them sit down and work out of the books. But we were short on time and I wanted to let them do a skit, so we ended up doing it anyway. And it was crazy. After that, we decorated bags to put our little snowman tins in. I kind of forgot about making an art project that could be a present for parents, but we decorated some tin cans with tissue paper to look like snowmen, and I figured we could stick them in a bag as a parent present.
The only actual school stuff we did today was take a spelling test. Some of the girls hadn't finished their stories yet, so I gave them time after the test to finish up. Then we played Telephone Pictionary. I had a stack of blank paper for each student. For some reason, they had a hard time understanding how to play. You just write a phrase about Christmas, and pass your papers to the person next to you. Then they draw a picture on the next sheet that matches the phrase. Then you pass it all over again going through the cycle of writing then drawing, writing then drawing, until your original stack of papers comes back to you.
I had students flipping their papers over, writing on the backs of the papers, drawing on the same page... two of them had to ask for help because they were so confused. I wanted to do a second round (that probably would've gone better), but it was time to open presents so we could get to church on time for lunch.
They all loved their presents. We did a different type of gift exchange (they wrote down something they wanted and their gift exchange partner only got the name of the person the initials of that gift). A few of them got it right! I gave them each a candy bar and a pack of paper with a cute design on it. The only not so good part was that one boy doesn't like chocolate, so he didn't want a candy bar. I felt kind of bad about that. I got some cool presents too: a clip-on desk lamp, scarf, kitchen timer, lotion, an ornament... two of my students didn't give me a present, but that's okay.
We walked over to church with the 1st and 2nd graders (their teacher was at church practicing bells with the 8th graders). Wow. It is pretty challenging to get 20 students ready to go out into the cold. But we made it! The board of education and their wives served our noon meal. It was very tasty. Then we had our last practice (which only had a few mistakes). I think we're ready for Sunday night!
When we got back to school, we separated into the older kid group and the younger kid group. The older kids watched "Tom and Huck" in Mr. E's room. The younger group came into my room and borrowed the projector to watch a Kung Fu Panda Christmas movie. I corrected the 7th and 8th graders' geography tests while they watched the movie. Mr. E wanted to have them watch "Tom and Huck" because they'd never heard of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. I had seen the movie before, but it had been a while. There was actually a bunch of swearing! Every time someone in the movie let a word slip that maybe they shouldn't have, my kids all turned around to look at Mr. E and me. Overall, they liked the movie.
Afterwards, I passed back their tests and gave each of the 7-8th graders a candy bar. When the dust had settled and all the kids were sent home, I shot some hoops in the gym to get rid of some energy (or maybe stress???). One family of students were waiting for their mom to pick them up, so we played a few rounds of Lightning. I lost most of the time, but I won once!!! The oldest girl is in 7th grade and she is under the impression that I am an amazing basketball player because I swished two threes in a row once after a basketball game. I've never been able to do it again, but she still thinks I'm the bomb. I guess I won't complain about that!
Our Christmas programs are Sunday night and Monday night, so I won't be able to head for home until after the program Christmas Eve (if the weather is good) or Christmas morning (if the weather is not so good). Pray for good weather!!!
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