I should be a grandma

The other day I was testing a new 4th grader for enrollment at Sylvan:

In the middle of the process, he pipes in with "How many kids do you have?"
"None," I answer, ready to proceed with the test.
"Well, do you have any grandkids?"

I'm attempting to take it as a compliment. =)

Where popcorn comes from

Another kid story:

A couple nights ago at my teaching table, I had a 6th grader working on learning to write essays and a kindergartener(?) learning how to read. While Clarence, the 6th grader, was coming up with ideas for his paper about good friends, Darien, the little guy, was about to read a book about popcorn.

It's good to get kids thinking about what they are going to read before they read it so that they can connect their prior knowledge with the stuff they're about to learn, so I asked Darien what he knew about popcorn. Having already read the book in a previous lesson with a different teacher, Darien practically had the story memorized, so I turned his attention to popcorn itself by asking, "where does popcorn come from?"

Darien thought a minute then replied in all earnestness, "popcorn comes from cows, doesn't it?"

What a delight to be able to enlighten someone about something simple for a change! We used the word itself (a compound word, in case you didn't know it, dear reader . . . whoever you may or may not be) to deduce that popcorn came from corn. Clarence threw in his pre-school theory that it came from some fanciful place filled with all good things to eat (a theory he, of course, has not held for a very long time). And the mystery was solved.

A few minutes later, Clarence was still wondering how to put into words what a good friend is like, and Darien was helping him out with such insightful comments as "a friend is someone who doesn't say you're stupid" and Clarence was writing those comments down, too, along with his own.

All-in-all, we learned a lot that night. The next time I saw him, Darien still remembered where corn comes from, and Clarence remembered Darien as the kid who thought popcorn came from cows.

So, what have you learned today? =)

Meet Mr. Backpack

Oops!

I regretted saying it about 5 minutes after it was out of my mouth. By that time, Tammy had had plenty of time to do her best to make the backpack feel like a vital member of our working community.

At Sylvan, the kids are grouped at tables of three students to one teacher. Each student is working on his individual assignments, and the teacher monitors the progress of all three, making sure that the lessons are completed with the maximum success. Today, I had John working on 4th grade math, Abigail working on 1st grade math, and Tammy working on beginning reading. Tammy's a pretty friendly person, and it wasn't long before she was striking up a conversation with Abigail while I was trying to get John started on his work. I could tell that Abigail was going to have a very hard time concentrating on her work, so I instructed her to move one chair closer to John and to put her backpack in the seat she had been occupying so that her backpack wouldn't cause the chair to tip over (it had previously been on the back of the chair) and so that her backpack could "do his work while you do yours." Just a simple, silly sentence--we all knew it was silly!--but Mr. Backpack breathed his first breath in that moment and began disrupting my table as only a child with nothing better to do can disrupt things.

Tammy tried to get him to do some work. She handed him my stack of papers and a pencil (when my back was turned) a couple of times. I managed to put a stop to that by convincing her that Backpack couldn't earn tokens for her, so she should do her own work. I suspect her of trying to have conversations with him, too, when my attention was not with her at the moment. Finally, I threatened to move Backpack to a different table altogether and met with much more success (in fact, Abigail at one point nearly left her eraser in front of him, thought better of it, and moved it to her space on the table--I watched that whole exchange out of the corner of my eye).

One little comment--so simple, so silly, so fateful--changed the course of a table today. Ironically enough, today Tammy was learning about characters in stories: perhaps she already knows more than enough about them. =)