Saturday, March 2, 2019

Slice of Life 2019 2 of 31: Moments that make you laugh

Throughout the month of March, I am participating in the Slice of Life Story Challenge. I am happy to co-host this event with the team at Two Writing Teachers. Everyone is welcome!


Sometimes, there are moments in classrooms that just make you laugh.
I was teaching a lesson to fourth-graders about the importance of balancing information in sections.
Sometimes you find that there’s too much information for a question that you thought would be one
section and sometimes there’s too little, so you have to make a decision about how to split or combine
sections.

After demonstrating what I meant, I had students examine their own notes and planned
sections to see if they had any possible examples of too much or too little.
When I asked for some shares, B. raised his hand. Yes B?

“How to tell the difference between males and females.”

Like several other students in the room, as well as the classroom teacher,
I tried not to laugh. (Some of the students tried harder than others.)
Maybe to some of their surprise, I asked him to say more about that, and when he did,
we all learned that telling the difference between male and female iguanas is trickier
than you might think. That led to some interesting suggestions on how he could split the section.
(I’ll let you think about what those suggestions could have been.)

As I said, there are moments in classrooms that just make you laugh.


Happy slicing,

9 comments:

  1. I WISH I had written down all the comments and the stories that made me smile from my classrooms. The honesty of children and their unique perspective certainly make you smile.

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  2. Haha. Yes. Those moments are good ones. Somehow they bring us all a little closer together I find.

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  3. And we need those moments! Love these smiley stop-overs especially on days when smiles are hard to find!

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  4. Love that moment. I miss them...
    And... I am having a tough time getting through Blogger's controls... Yes, I'm human... I can't seem to get through those photos..
    and I'm not sure now how I'm posting this year... YIKES!!!!

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  5. Totally! And teachers ... they are so funny to experience these moments with as a coach. I was just talking about this with teachers the other day! I think your slice could have used a visual or two!

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  6. Those are the times that I miss about being in the classroom. There are so many of those little times in every classroom that big a little joy. Thanks for reminding me about those days!

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  7. What I love about this moment is your calm, well-practiced response: "Can you say more about that?" which jumps in front of assumptions and heads them off at the pass. This is, indeed, a moment for the ages! Hilarious, but handled well by you :)

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  8. Fourth graders always say the most profound things. I agree that when teaching a lesson, suppressing laughter is usually best if a comment is meant in earnest, but I do love laughing with my students about the goofy things that come our of both of our mouths during brain breaks or more casual periods such as snack time.

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  9. So many funny moments on a daily basis... let's compile them into a book!

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