Teaching My Favorite Peeps

Have I mentioned how much I love my students recently? Because I really do. This past week and a half I had a blast in some of my classes.

To start off, I'll set the scene in 5th grade. They were learning lesson 2: Whose Drone is This? Essentially, the vocab consisted of different items, such as camera or umbrella, and then identifying who it belonged to. The game we played was a version of Heads Up, 7 Up. For those of you who are not familiar with this game, students will put their heads on their desks with their thumbs up. Meanwhile, 7 other students are walking around tapping the thumbs of 7 classmates; one for each selected student. The students whose thumbs were tapped would then try and guess which classmate was the tapper. In my version, only 4 students were walking around. Instead of putting thumbs up, I had the 4 students walk around with a piece of paper that had a vocabulary word on the front, and they would place this card on the desk of a classmate. The students who had a card would stand up once I said "heads up", and they would guess who gave them the card. My students were really getting into the game. Some of them, the boys in particular, would tap on desks or slide the cards around to make it harder to discern what was happening. I tried to make it as fair as possible, so if 2 rounds went by without any correct guesses, I would have the givers, the students who would give the card, sit down in favor of 4 new givers being picked. I certainly was a fan of this game growing up, from elementary school really until high school; I am glad to see the new generation of students sharing the same excitement.

Heads Up, 7 Up

The subsequent 5th grade class the following week (still the same lesson just a different period of the lesson) involved a team relay race. I split the class in half: Team A and Team B. I would have one student from each team come to the front. I would display a scrambled word on the board, and the first student, of the two, to spell the word correctly would earn a team point. For example, ecrama unscrambled is camera. Whoever spelled camera first would win. I, of course, emphasized to be nice to teammates in the event the word was misspelled or they were not fast enough. This was mainly said for the sake of my super competitive boys. The students were having a great time trying to spell the words quickly. My favorite moments were when both students would be stumped over the scrambled word. On a few occasions I did have to provide a small hint, but they could mostly figure it out on their own. The best part was when the rest of the team would figure out the answer even though the writer had not yet connected the dots. The groans from behind me would cause me to giggle; there would even be some begging and pleading for the writer to please just hurry up and figure out the answer. I remember that kind of suffering all too well, but you are only as strong as your weakest link.

In my first 4 classes, I had no issues when it came to the actual spelling of words. Sure, students would occasionally misspell the word so badly I would not immediately assume that was the selected word, but otherwise totally fine. My fifth class, however, was a little different. The scrambled word on the board was "this". Now, you might know where this story is going based on the vocabulary word, but for those of you who are ignorant in this situation, like me, allow to me to shed some light. I had scrambled the word into "hist". My one little child was doing what the majority of the students had done: pull out letters that might go at the beginning. He started with s. I was silently shaking my head, but I let him continue; he would figure it out. He then put an h. I still had 0 clue what was about to happen. He wrote an i. At that moment, I went "oh, shit. He's going to put a t". He put a t. I could do nothing but laugh. He looked at the word as if confused as to how the word "shit" had appeared on the board. Technically, you can make that word from "this", so kudos on that end. I simply laughed off the entire moment, and told him that was not the word. It then clicked for him what the actual vocab word was, and he managed to score a point for his team. I swear I have more laughs in my 5th grade classes compared to most others. There is just something about them.

On a less potty-mouthed note, my 3rd graders were just about the cutest things ever last Friday. They always come in with the biggest smiles on their faces. Because we are still only on lesson 1, the focus is on saying "hello" and saying "nice to meet you". I found a song whose lyrics are quite literally "hello, nice to meet you". That's it; 5 lyrics. Perfect! I gave each student a piece of paper with one word on it: hello, nice, to, meet, you. Whenever they would hear the word on their paper, they would quickly stand up, and then sit right back down. We practiced a few times before I let the song play. I started them off slow at 0.75 speed. They knocked it out of the park... so we went faster. It was now at normal speed. Again, knocked it out of the park... so we went faster. It was now at 1.25 speed. Yet again, knocked it out of the park... so we went faster. The video was on 2 times speed. They were shooting up and down out of their chairs. It only made sense that after we went super fast we would go super slow. 0.25 speed is no joke. What was once a one and a half minute song was pretty much five minutes. I only let it play for about a minute before I turned it off. The music was just too creepy at that speed.

I then had another activity for them so they could practice speaking. Essentially, they would play rock, paper, scissors, and whoever lost would have to stand behind the winner, cheering them on. I did a little demo with some of the students. I would walk up and say "hello, I'm Sam" (or a different book character from the book textbook), and they would introduce themselves back. We would rock, paper, scissors, and I always seemed to beat them. Oh well, it just meant I had forced fans for my little demonstration. I could tell they were getting pumped to play the game, so I let them start. There is nothing quite like hearing 20 squeaky voices yelling "rock, paper, scissors" at the same time. They would even bounce and jump around when they released their hand sign. Adorable! Eventually, it came time for the final student to play the bosses (myself and my co teacher) while their 19 classmates cheered them on from behind. Spoiler, I lost during all 3 games we played in the first class. My skills are a little rusty, I guess. During the second class, however, I had students come up to me during the actual game, so I would play against them. Again, I lost, so I would then cheer them on from behind while they went and found other classmates to battle it out. Oh, to be a kid again.

The Train Game