Student Stories #1

Recently I had a couple funny things happen in one of my kids classes. The kids are between 7-8 years old, and are really fun (although often very crazy!). We were playing hangman during class, and I had done several word combinations: Purple Crayon, Green Pencil, Red Marker and so on. I was about to move to another game but all of them were shouting, "One more, one more!"

"One more?"

They all shouted yeahs and yays, so I started the last puzzle. This time, the answer was "happy teacher." The students were guessing and guessing, and suddenly one of them realized that the last word was teacher. "Teacher, teacher," they all started to cry out. "Yeah," I said, "but what's this word? What letter goes here? What letter?"

Suddenly it occurred to them that since my past puzzles had colors, this one must, too. So they shouted, "Brown! Brown teacher!"

"Brown teacher? No....!" I laughed.

Then, one student looked very thoughtful, putting his pointer finger to his mouth. His eyes lit up and he pointed right at me and said, "WHITE TEACHER!!!"

I couldn't help but laugh. It took some time before they realized the word was happy.

After class, I was helping a student with her homework. We were spelling different words, like scissors, pencil, eraser... I would tell her, "ssssssssssssss is for snake! What letter? ssssss." She would shout, "S!" and write it on her sheet. We did this for a while until we got to the word "book." She wrote, "kook." "K-O-O-K?" I asked her. "Not cook, BOOK!"

She grabbed her eraser, saying, "Ah, so so so so" before erasing both the k's and adding two b's! "Ah! Not boo--well, not B-O-O-B, silly! B-O-O-K!"

Days like that make teaching pretty fun. Stay tuned for more stories to come!