Whew!

Today was the last day of summer school, and I am exhausted! It was a fun day, because we played review games, gave out awards, and gorged on salty, sugary snacks. (My co-teacher and I get more hyper than the kids when we eat junk--I blame the lack of sleep.) Some summer school highlights:

• The student we nicknamed "Cookie Monster". He was such a funny, roly-poly of a kid who loved to talk (and write) about food (sometimes to the point of TMI, like his journal entry about how eating lots of tacos kept him in the bathroom all night). He earned the nickname after he wore a Cookie Monster t-shirt to school one day (side note: those are extremely popular in SoCal, for some odd reason), and he was voted "Best Dancer" on the last day of class. When he grows up, he wants to be a social worker, but sometimes he forgets the term and says he wants to be a "social studies". :-)
• My students (rising 7th graders) were obsessed with finding out personal information about me and my co-teachers, especially our first names. On the last day, we played a trivia game where we showed them facts and they had to guess which one of us it referred to--I loved how my kids used sophisticated logic to figure out the answers, e.g., the fact was "I wanted to become an interpreter in high school" and they were all, "Well you speak Spanish, and you told us once that you want to become a Spanish professor, so it must be you!" Where was that rationality when I was teaching them about arguments in non-fiction texts?
• Student interactions were always pretty interesting. We had one kid that tried to bully some of the other kids, and he failed miserably. Even the quietest kids in class would stand up to him if he tried to be tough, and I think he learned, at least a little bit, that trying to make people afraid of him was a losing game. It didn't help that none of our kids have hit puberty yet, so they're all still under 5 feet with teeny voices.
• After school on the last day, all of the teachers worked together to plant in the school garden and to paint a mural in one of the hallways. I'm allergic to LA plant life, so I helped with the mural, and it looked incredible when we were finished.

I'm tired and I have a lot to do (I'm moving on Friday, plus I have PD and all that for school), but summer school was definitely a fun--albeit challenging, at times--experience. Now I'm really excited to enter second grade in the fall. :-)


**Today (Monday) wasn't really the last day of summer school--I started this awhile ago and just finished the post today.