2015 ILS Winter Olympics

Drama, drama, drama went down today at school.


All three of my troubled triumvirate had issues to deal with today.  One went home early, one hung out in the office doing work, and the other finished work in the classroom.  Out of the three, only one actually made it to participate in the Olympics.  But that individual got all the late work done and was respectful/dealt with the consequences of prior actions in an appropriate manner.


One student got sent to eat lunch in the office.  This student mushed pretty much all of the lunch on the tray in one heap and shoveled it together into a sandwich (spaghetti, French dressing, pb and j sandwich with butter and cinnamon... it was gross).  Then, I had just gotten the class to calm down from the "oh gross, it looks like barf!" when the student forced out an incredibly loud fart (on purpose).  When I ordered the student to the office, the individual said, "What? I said excuse me."  It was just the straw that broke the camel's back.  On the way to the office, the student shoved the lunch tray in a classmate's face. 


After school, another student came back to school teary-eyed because she couldn't find her phone.  She had it in her coat pocket all day and wondered if an upset classmate hid it somewhere... they found the phone lying on the floor of the loft above our coatroom.  Most likely placed there by another student. 


But, on to happier things.  This afternoon, our last NLSW activity was the Winter Olympics.  We had to make some team adjustments since one of my students was sick and the triumvirate wouldn't be participating.  First place team got three points, second got two, third got three, and everyone else got none.  Our first event was the biathalon!  Students ran from one side of the gym to the other, crawling under chairs on the way there and weaving around them on the way back.  A lot of the bigger kids got stuck under the chairs.  Speed Skating: run a lap around the gym in sock feet.  That one was good, but there were too many runners for the space.  We should've done four heats of that event (we did two).  The hockey shootout ended in a tie for second.  Originally, players had five tries to make it in the net.  For the tie breaker, they had three balls.  The next event was curling.  One student sat on a scooter, another gave them a push to see how close they could get to center court.  It took a while to get the hang of it, so we gave them some practice pushes.  In the real deal, a bunch made it pretty close!  One even made it in the circle!   Dog sled racing was interesting... they tried to tie the jump rope to the scooter... I told them they'd be disqualified if they did that.  The musher had to hold the rope with both hands.  Once they got that figured out, we ran into the trouble of the kids falling off the scooters.  Some even crashed into the wall as they tried to turn around for the race back.  We had to do it a second time because the second place winner fell off her scooter on the way back and just scooted on her bottom the whole way back... disqualification? Not sure.  We just redid it.  The luge also used scooters.  Two scooters hooked together, two kids sitting on them, one pusher.  Down the gym and back.  Our final event was the bobsled race.  The whole team (minus one pusher) sat on a folded up mat on top of four scooters.  The pusher pushed the whole team down and back.  It even sounded like a real bobsled!  We ended up splitting that event into three separate events: six person, five person, and four person bobsled race.  With all these people gone, the teams didn't have equal numbers on them, making it harder/easier for certain teams to push.  So everyone got some points in the bobsled race.


England won our Olympics, Mexico got second, and USA got third.  Germany was fourth and lost only because their bobsled time was a little longer.  Canada did really well too.  I announced the winners during the award ceremony and forgot that you're supposed to announce third place before second and second before first... I announced first place first.  Oops.  I was just so excited!  Mr. D had made medals for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place, so we passed those out.  And we had just enough time for everything!  All in all, a successful first Winter Olympics.


Now I'm shutting down my classroom, going to head up to Clarissa, MN to visit college friends.  Mr. D and Mrs. B are moving the book fair over to church.  They told me to pack up and go, so that's what I'm doing!