Stolen Thunder

Another whirlwind of a day...

We were all over the place this morning.  The 3rd and 4th graders were at church to practice their wax museum displays, so our class visited them and listened to them practice for the show tonight.  They were so cute!  A few kids came up to me to make sure I was going to visit them and hear their spiels.  When our time was up, we walked back to school, quickly studied for the spelling test, took the test, and then our guest "science fair judge" showed up to talk with the 6th graders about their science fair projects.

Each student was with her for about 10 minutes, just talking about their project: what they did, who helped them, where they got the idea... etc.  She really scared them when she told them they'd need to stay calm tonight when they shared their projects with everyone.  One boy came rushing back into the room with the most frightened look on his face, "Miss H, do we need to talk to people tonight?"  You could see his whole body relax when I explained that they weren't going to be on display, only their projects.

By the time everyone had had a turn, our Junior Achievement speaker had arrived.  Our speaker is from a local bank and comes once a week to talk about economics, money, budgeting, finding a job, all sorts of good stuff like that.  This week's topic was budgeting.  It was really interesting!  Each student got a fake job with a fake salary.  They had taxes taken out and then they had to budget the rest of their income.  After finding out how much they could spend on certain things, they got the chance to try it out.  Our speaker gave them a few choices about what they could buy for a car, ranging from really expensive, to pretty cheap.  She also did this for entertainment, clothes, housing, food, and miscellaneous.  They could decide how much they wanted to give to charity and whatever was left over from their paycheck was going in the bank as savings.   Listening to them budget their money made me want to try the recommended percentages to see if my budget is close to the one this program suggests.

Then it was lunch time, a short recess outside, singing practice in Mr. E's room, and then to the bus!  We visited MLC for their annual play.  This year's performance was "Who Can Fix the Dragon's Wagon?"  It was really cute!  They did a great job!  On the bus and in the auditorium, I realized that my ears have gotten used to everything being quiet.  My ears hurt from hearing screaming kids on the bus (we went up a really big hill on the way there) and screaming/laughing kids waiting for the play to start.  The actors tried to get the kids all excited before the play, so of course they were being loud.  And then they shut the lights off...  a hundred high pitched screams echoed off the walls of the theater.  Yikes!  I wanted to put my hands over my ears.  But that's too wimpy for a teacher.  So I just sat there.

At the end of the play, the cast came onstage and did a dance kind of thing.  And the concept was exactly what the teachers are doing for our ending skit.  Thankfully, the cast only used two of the songs we're using for ours, and they didn't use any props.  So I think ours will still be entertaining for our students.  But they'll probably ask us afterwards, "Did you get the idea to do this from the MLC play?"  Sigh.  Somehow, I think they won't be very "wowed" by our act now.  Oh well.  The adults in our audience should still be impressed! I'm still really excited to perform.