field trip

I have to admit that I had a really good day at school yesterday, despite crying and complaining about it with my mom and cousin in the evening. The kids were excited to see me -- a bunch of them even snuck up to the classroom before the bell rang. The field trip ran really smoothly, especially for me, since my class was split among three third grade groups, leaving me responsible for only six students. The remaining hour at school was successful -- they were held absolutely captive as I read and acted out poems from Jack Prelutsky's New Kid on the Block, and they played together nicely during Game Time. My angel/devil child held it together until only the last five minutes of school, when he chased a girl around the building and punched her in the face.

Perhaps the best moment came at the beginning of the day, and I say it was the best because it was the first piece of evidence that I have taught my students anything. We were exiting the freeway at Long Beach, into a commercial area filled with sparkley high-rise office buildings and hotels, and several of my students started shrieking my name, pointing their fingers out the windows, and yelling, "It's a urban! It's a urban!" A vocabulary word! Which has been learned, if not grammatically, then at least conceptually! This was followed by, "A skyscraper! Lot's of skyscrapers!" (also a vocab word), and, "Look, flowers, they are flourishing!" (this word refers to either flowers and children, I taught them).

It felt really good.