I'm still something of a hot mess, but it feels like I've turned a corner. Here are some of the joyful bits that have helped get me there:
- Having a pack of kindergartners from several different classrooms run up to me on the playground at recess to give hugs, high fives, and various other forms of exuberant greetings.
- A teacher I covered for came back to the class at the end of the day to thank me for taking such good care of her class.
- The reluctant reader I've been tutoring spent about 10 minutes negotiating the number of pages of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory he would have to read to me. I finally agreed to swap off with him after six pages. He started to read and the magic I had been hoping to conjure for months now finally struck. He lost count of pages and instead got captured by the story. TWENTY-EIGHT pages later, he finished the book. It wasn't until I was on my way out the door that I even told him how much he had read.
- I was wowed by a group of six-year-olds who really got into the Story Tag Game--one person starts a story, another person picks up the thread and moves the story along, etc. The students demonstrated tremendous creativity--a Sasquatch came to school and got hurt on the swing so the nurse called his mom to come get him. Zombies chased the class during the "Queen Mrs. Allen Day Parade" so they took the Bat Plane to space and hopped from star to star to escape. Really?! They were respectful of their fellow classmates, and suitably appreciative of the twists and turns the stories took. (There was much laughter when the Sasquatch was playing video games in his underwear.) It was almost too much fun to be considered work.
- A sweet little girl was really struggling to get through a class assignment. I sat next to her, thinking she just needed some adult supervision to help her to focus on the work, only to discover that she really did not understand it. We looked at the problems from a number of different angles before the Aha! Moment came, at which point, she impulsively jumped up and gave me a big hug and a thank you.
What little joys have you caught this week?
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