The first Monday of the school year, and I have to say the day seemed a bit more calm than last week's days (either that or I've increased my tolerance for chaos already). Of course the calm wasn't a complete calm, but at least enough to leave Ms. B and me with enough energy to laugh about our very active mouse situation. *More on that later.
I've started learning about our students. For example, we had no time for the scheduled "Read Aloud" block put at the end of the day for the first few days of school. I'll even admit to thinking the scheduled timing for it was a bit off the rocker. On Friday, we found out something different... a secret being kept, the treasure at the end of the rainbow. Our time was short and the pages read even shorter, but the students were mesmerized, the room was quiet (almost), and a calm had settled over the crowd. Turns out, we were a bit off the rocker for not using the read aloud time from the first day of school (Lesson learned!). From now on, our days may rarely end without at least a few minutes of read aloud time at the end of the day. We'll have to keep up a list of really good read alouds so our kids will continue to be pulled in and calmed down. The current book is Inches and Miles by John R. Wooden. Right now, the inch worm named Inches and the mouse named Miles are on a journey to find all the blocks that are needed to build the Pyramid of Success!
After school, things got interesting. As you probably picked up, we have a mouse issue. Our little mouse friend, I've dubbed him as Despereaux after the main character in one of my favorite children's chapter books, Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. As I typed this blog, though, I realized he could be our mouse friend, Miles, on the search of the Pyramid of Success?! Anyway, our mouse friend was out and about again today (first appearance made last week) after the noise of the classroom quieted and while Ms. B and I planned for the rest of the week.
His first appearance today was to check out our location, as he peeked out a few times from behind the projector cart. After doing this a few times he ran back to his hole in the teacher corner. This was, indeed, not the last sighting of him.
A bit later, as the pencil sharpeners were grinding pencils to sharpness and we were attempting to have a conversation over the noise, we were brought to a pause by a scream, not your normal scream, but that of a mouse who must have had something important to say. Then, we spotted him as he ran along the outer wall of the classroom.
Even later, as we were wrapping up, laughing, and discussing the interesting mouse events that happened to be taking place in our section of the hall... (A 6th grade class was bid farewell by their mouse as he climbed up the class computer and held his ground even when the teacher approached him in attempt to scare him off.) I could have sworn I saw the tip of a little mouse tail in our closet, about 3 shelves up. I'm pretty sure Ms. B wondered if my mind had imagined the tail because of the topic of our conversation. I promised her that I was sure I saw Despereaux's terrible little tail (this D still has a tail!) as he was running for cover within the stuff in the closet. As I fished out our bags to bring them to safety and shake out any potential guests, I saw the mouse run down the back of the shelf and into the dark depths of the closet. Now, my task was to get the mouse out of the closet completely, but I couldn't chance having the little monster run over my feet. So there I was, climbing from a table to an upside down tote in order to get close enough to scare him. All this time, Ms. B is laughing and watching from the top of nearby student desks and wondering if I happened to have my digital camera handy. (With the way these events keep happening, I'm sure she'll get some pictures of my daring adventures and my problem-solving strategies soon enough!) The mouse finally surrendered the closet. We locked it up, vowing not to leave it open long enough for him to visit again.
All-in-all, this Monday turned out to be rather nice (my good mood is repressing the moments of frustration that still existed throughout the day). I'm looking forward to the rest of the week with the class and moving forward in teaching and learning.
0 comments:
Post a Comment