week 10 bonus: Big Mac

No, not a hamburger from McDonalds.
A student brought me a My Little Pony. A little stuffy My Little Pony, and his name is Big Mackintosh.

I have a My Little Pony poster on my desk, and a bin of ponies for kids to play with at recess when the weather is bad.  

As kids, we know there are problems, big ones and little ones, and our solutions, though simplistic, are meant to help those around us, even though sometimes we have an egocentric point of view. Sometimes - I'm speaking in generalities - there are those kids who create non-profits to help the hungry or develop apps for individuals with PTSD.

Anyway, I think what spoke to me as a child about My Little Pony were the themes of kindness, honesty, laughter, loyalty, and generosity. There was something inside me that would say 'YES! This matters!" And it still does. Both the traits and the little shouting voice. Other shows and toys aren't promoting such positive ideas, and these positive ideas are traits that help promote good character. I also appreciate that the characters are anthropmorphized. Yes, they're ponies, but little girls [and boys for that matter] aren't looking at distorted images of the human body. Like Daniel Tiger, it's a message. Hopefully in a non-threatening vehicle.




Kindness. Honesty. Laughter. Loyalty. Generosity. It matters.

week 10: Keeping Springfield [PA] clean

I have a third grade reading group that has been studying 'Mr. Popper's Penguins' and early on the the book, I made a paper penguin, laminated it, and stuck it on my door. I found the penguin character entertaining, truth be told, but also because children still couldn't find our room, so it was a land mark sort of thing [look for the penguin!] but also because I was trying to come up with something to engage students.

This was semi successful/semi failure; I started writing questions on the penguin meant for student engagement, but there was no method for students to respond. I had no sheets of paper or an envelope or pencils or a reward of any kind. Maybe I should have grabbed one of the magnetic locker pencil holders off our fridge and brought it in [I think of this now, as I'm looking at the picture along with all of you].
I have rewards, let me tell you, you should see my pencil drawer.

Every day, here is the happy little penguin, doing a happy dance on the door. What to do... What to do...

Time passes. On what is a seemingly unrelated note, my new cohort, Jarrod and and I, are also sort of in charge of the Litter Free School zone program, and initially I thought I would end up doing a random clean up day with the fifth graders. Fifth grade, more responsible, better listening skills, et cetera. ... Or so I thought. Here I am, the one supposed to be doing the teaching.

Third grade and I are still reading MPP, as I only see them once or twice a week, and it occurs to me after we read a whole chapter devoted to the penguin puttering around the house building a nest from house flotsam[read:litter] - Lightbulb - there just might be a cross-curricular learning/small service opportunity in there.

I think we managed to get out on the last nice day of November [70 degrees and sunny - how did this happen?!]. The students had an absolute blast. And to top it all off, they love this book so much, they were bouncing around the playground, looking for litter, pretending to be penguins, picking up trash with their 'flippers'. The school grounds are pretty clean though, so we didn't find much. Go team keeping the place clean!

I wouldn't want to use trash for my project idea from outside anyway, because that isn't 'safe' trash. Before we went outside, the students and I talked about what I had in mind - building a penguin nest for the door out of bits of debris we'd find around school, like the penguin did in the book. Oh, the excitement! But what could that look like? What was 'safe' trash to use for this project and what wasn't 'safe'. I made it clear ahead of time that we weren't going to use anything from outside.
I didn't expect to encounter any rusted metal, exposed needles or broken glass, but one never knows what they're going to encounter. Thankfully, we didn't see any of those things outside the school. We did find a lot of plastic wrappers, plastic 'stuff' and bits of paper. We threw all that out.

Glad the riding mower didn't hit that. That day, I learned third grade can completely surprise you. Make no assumptions about anyone.

When we came back in, we talked more about what a collage is and what we could put on it for our project - paper clips, too short pencils, the wrapper off the top of their breakfast cereal from breakfast, the plastic spoon they used at lunch [as long as we washed it off]. This was waste that we knew where it came from and was safe to use, it wasn't going to hurt us. Should we use a Unifix cube from math class that was laying on the floor? No, give it back to the teacher. What about an extra cotton ball from a class project? The kids agreed 'as long as there was no spit, snot or blood involved, it's cool', they could use it. Their words, not mine. They saved up some things and on Friday, we began putting a penguin rookery together.

What they don't know yet is that they have to collaboratively write a short piece about

a. what a rookery is and what it's really made out of

b. which penguins make them [because not all do]

c. why we made ours [citing where they found it in the book]

d. what keep PA beautiful is

and we'll put it on the door with Capt. Cook. Gork.

week nine bonus: halloween fun

Holidays are extra special fun times that not all schools observe due to the incredible diversity of their student body populations. Springfield is pretty homogenized, so like the rest of the area, they do holidays. EVERYBODY showed up. I mean everybody. They had the costume parade where everyone walked around school, but I've never seen so many parents and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and I'm not even going to guess who all else came to take pictures. Needless to say, I was blown away. First grade told me to turn back because there were, like 60 people in that room, you couldn't move. You couldn't really move in 5th grade either but... sugar up some 5th grade boys, that's kind of self explanatory :) they were really cute though, someone dressed up as a working gumball machine, and two of the kids came as Thing 1 and Thing 2. And obviously a bunch of grapes.

Mr. Alex and I go way back. We are Trek nerds.  This is Fear. I mean Mr. Moser.

And this is Nightmare. I mean, Mr. Howells.

Cats. Why are there cats, that has nothing to do with Halloween. It's me and I love cats and they are my cats, for starters, so there. Secondly, October 28th was National Cat Day, and as a Cat Lover, I would be remiss if I didn't bring that to your attention, so I've done my job for the week educating you in trivial knowledge [you might win Jeopardy with that, you never know]. And lastly, I was a crazy cat lady for Halloween, which the kids got a huge kick out of. I safety pinned all those toy cats to my sweater, and I let the actual cat roll all over it because you can't be a cat lady with out some stray cat hair.

Bonus bonus: pumpkin walk

The week before the week before Halloween (so this was the early 20's, not the late 20's) the kids were incredibly, diligently busy carving pumpkins. I'd show up in a classroom and half of them would be gone or I would be working with someone and another student or adult would appear at my do and say, no, you don't understand Miss O, they have to carve now.

I really had no idea. 

That weekend my mom and I went out for the pumpkin walk, early, before it got dark. Nature trail, the sign said. 

... Okay. (What does that mean?)

Flashlight rental. 

... We need a flashlight? What?

We decided that there were chestnut and witch hazel trees back there among the sugar maples. This based on leaves, mostly, and the weird way witch hazel grows. Oh, yes, sugar maples which the students TAP AND MAKE SYRUP FROM.  Had we know they were selling the last six bottles of the year that night, we would have brought some extra money to support the program.

Wow. It's lovely back here. Who knew it was so lovely back here? (This is my mom. Autumn is her favorite time of year)

Dear Robert Ostrander: 

Student Chemistry Club is alive and well at NWHS. 

We took this photo for my Uncle Bob, who graduated from Northwestern in 1975, and went on to get a PhD and on to win awards for his work in chemistry, amongst them, recognition from Linus Pauling. His students nicknamed him Doc Dement-O because they spend the first week or so of high school chem turning things different colors and creating smoke and explosions and playing 'mad chemist'. Then 'now that you've got that out of your system' he says, 'we can get down to the real fun that is real chemistry'. 

My students think I'm funny or weird. I know, at least, I come by it honestly.