At 12:30 pm I walked into the concession area of the gym and stopped to tie my shoe. All the sudden I heard a loud, "Kindergarten!" accompanied by a bunch of screaming children. My aide Mando and I turned to each other. We both had the same feeling-something bad was going on in the gym. We slowly entered the room and saw a bunch of our kindergarten students running around with foam balls and something that looked like giant Q-tips. It was as if we entered a war zone. The kids were running around not listening to anything that the PE teacher said to them. Mando and I quickly called out certain kids' names in our sternest voices. Our class was going crazy! It really reminded me of that scene in Mean Girls where all the sudden the girls broke out into a fight as if they were jungle animals. My mouth fell open. I was amazed at how our class acted. I've seen them have rough days, but boy did this top everything from before. We quickly had the kids in a line and took them back to the classroom.
When we got back, I explained to the whole class that their behavior wouldn't be tolerated. For our discipline system I have a giant cardboard stoplight that we use. Each child has a clothespin with their name on it. When the child gets a warning, they move their pin to the yellow and when they get a second warning it goes in the red. Red means that they miss recess for the day (which in kindergarten is a HUGE deal). Anyways, I had to tell five kids to move their pins up one color because of their behavior in PE. This meant that they landed smack dab in the red. We talked about how the kids should treat adults and modeled how that should happen. When I told them that I was disappointed in them that sure did the trick. Their faces fell. Hopefully they learned a big lesson today. We'll see if they actually take it in.
BONUS STORY:
Admist all the chaos today we practiced our songs for the Christmas program. It's only 12 school days away....God help us. We're singing Jingle Bell Rock and All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth. The three of us (Mikey, Mando, and myself) made up hand motions as we went along. Best part of my day by far. I love teaching kindergarten because we teach so much of our material "repeat after me" style. The kids loved Mikey's hand motions/dance moves so much that one of them could not even do the motions. She was laughing way too hard :)
No matter how awful part of the day might be, you can't help but love kindergartens when they sing Christmas songs. Gosh darn those kids for being so cute!
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