Brought to You by the Letter T

Some words are so much on your mind, that they're always just a hair away from being pushed down the direct-to-mouth chute and landing out in the world.

For example, if you're eight years old and you're thinking about poop, the chances are extremely high that the word "poop" is going to tumble out of your mouth.  Now the kid next to you is thinking about poop, and has to say the word as well.

While reading Charlotte's Web aloud, with Wilbur's and Fern's and Templeton's names floating around near the direct-to-mouth chute, it's easy to accidentally call a student by the name of juicy, delicious-looking farm animal.

Kids needing to ask me a question reach in and hastily grab the first word they encounter.  "Mom!  Can I pass out the lunches since Sylvio's not here?? Ahh!  I just called my teacher 'Mom'!"  Once in a while the grabbing for a word is so arbitrary I even get called "Dad" or "Grandma."

This hasty word selection phenomenon is dramatically heightened when playing The Letter Game.  During our morning meeting activity, or a drama class warm-up, the kids put their minds to the test to see how many words they can name that start with a particular letter - no repeats.  When it's your turn, you just grab the next "L" word that floats into your consciousness and blurt it out.  If it's not the fourth time that this same word has been attempted, and if it's actually a legitimate term, any word is fair game. 

Well....almost any word.

A couple of months ago we were playing this game with the letter T.  By the third time around the circle, several kids were out after failing to produce a word that met the two criteria.  When Dylan's turn came up again, he corralled all of the T-word possibilities in his brain, and fished out one that was a legitimate word and had definitely not been used before.

"Tampon!" he exclaimed.  With the exception of one other student who let out a shocked noise, and a teacher who kept in a shocked noise and made a note to touch base with Dylan after the game, we were on to "transform" with no discernable pause in the action.  I mean, the game has to stay moving after all!

Surprisingly, this was actually the second time that I've had to talk to a student about not randomly blurting out the word "tampon."

Nicknames

I am not a nickname person.  Perhaps it's because I have no real nicknames myself (Sarah is pretty hard to shorten), but if you tell me your name, I will always call you that exact name.  If your name is Jessica, I will call you...Jessica.  Never Jess.  Never Jessinator.  If you're a Michael who introduces himself as Mike, you'll never hear me call you Michael or Mikey.

It's the same with my students' names.  It really seems weird to me to shorten Christopher to Chris or to Angela to Angie, which is why when kids come up with new nicknames for their classmates, I can never get on board.

viking.com

One year I had a girl named Belle and--as you may have guessed--I always called her Belle.  Our morning greeting would come around, however, and Tyiesha would insist on calling her Bella.  "Where is this extra 'a' coming from?" I would wonder.  "It's belllllll.  No 'a' " I pointed out to Tyiesha on multiple occasions, but she insisted on her own twist.  Drew was also prone to his own version of nicknames, preferring to call Langston, "Langs."  One year, another one of the third grade teachers was named Mr. Duncan.  Well, at least that's what I called him.  Briana called him Mr. Dumpkin.  We had many lessons, she and I, on how his name was different than pumpkin.

It was a losing battle to convince any of them of the actual name.

Besides the name shortening or lengthening or tweaking, there's also the substituting of an entirely different one.  When encountering a classmate's mother, father, or sibling whose name is unknown, third graders tend to simply generate their own based on what they do know.  Robert frequently asks to set up sleepovers with Donardo at dismissal.  "Hi Donardo's Mom" he'll begin.

On Friday, I got to see an extension of this naming philosophy.  Robert and I were walking in the hall, when we ran into Christopher's younger brother.  "Hi Christopher Two!" Robert called out.

Do your or your students have any unusual nicknames?

Magical, Life-Giving Poop

From past experience planting seeds with third graders, I'm very well aware of Common Plant Misconception # 1: Standing by the plant table and staring at your sprout during snack clean-up helps speed the growing process.

Today, though, we unearthed two additional and perhaps equally widespread fallacies.

Common Plant Misconception # 2) Plants emerge, fully grown, from animals' butts. 

Common Plant Misconception # 3) When a mommy seed and a daddy seed love each other very much, they mate and have a baby plant.

Today's botany lesson began with the observation and sketching of our Brassica sprouts.  Known for good reason as "fast plants," our plants made a remarkable debut, shooting up from nothing over the course of a single weekend.  Sketches that day were impressive.  Now, though, a few days later, the plants haven't really changed all that much.  Well--some are now rather limp from over-fondling, but other than that they've stalled a bit.  Perhaps we need to do more staring during clean-up.

From today's anticlimactic observation, we moved on to reading about how seeds get from place to place.  This topic is actually quite perfect for third graders, as it involves permission to talk about poop.  Yes, we read about how animals eat fruit with seeds (which resulted in a rather excellent, X-ray style drawing by Nicole of some seeds chillin' in the belly of something furry) and then about how these seeds, well, let's just say they exit in the animals' waste and end up in the soil.  Or--to put it another way, as Ernesto did when I asked him to paraphrase that section,


"The animal eats the seeds....and then poops out a plant!"


And thus we have Plant Misconception # 2.  The kids and I all rather enjoyed picturing a squirrel pooping out a full-grown azalea. 

Ernesto chuckled too and then corrected himself.  Why, of course!  Plants come not straight out of the derrières of animals, but from seeds!  Those frisky, frisky seeds.  Unless, of course, your seeds haven't been in the mood lately.  DJ explained the reason why his cup was looking rather empty.  

"I don't think my two seeds like each other.  My plant's not growing!"


Now that we've got those two cleared up, our next lesson might center around Plant Misconception # 4: The names of plant parts and of feminine hygiene products are interchangeable. 

Fourth of July

Somehow, in book club one day, the need arose to refer to our nation's birthday.  Byron made sure to clarify for the other group members what he was talking about.   

"The Fourth of July--when the Earth was created."

As with many holidays, children know there's something special about them....but aren't always 100% solid on what that something is. 

Memorial Day

Joelle: "What is Memorial Day?"
Ms. Sarah: "It's a day to remember people who have died in a war."
Joelle: "But...it's when the pool opens."

Hanitizer

Why take the time to say two separate words when you could shorten it to just one? "Hand" + "sanitizer" = way too difficult. Derrick has renamed it, simply, "hanitizer." Hey, call it what you want--I just care that you use it. Swine flu is nobody's friend.

Life Outside of School

It's hard to know exactly what kids think I do when I’m not at school. Perhaps some of them actually envision me out and about doing teacher-personal-time things such as hunting gems, riding unicorns, and then returning to take a nap in the little bedroom I’ve fashioned inside the classroom closet.

One morning, I observed another school’s all-school meeting and came in to school late, around 10:30. While the kids were in the hallway on their bathroom break, I came into the classroom, hung up my coat and put my bags into the closet. Michael came back into the room as I was coming out of the closet. “You were in there the whole time?” he asked, incredulous.

Little Baby Tampons

Third graders have fairly loose standards for word usage. Many of them seem to operate under the philosophy that if a word falls within a few letters of the word they’re looking for, it’ll suffice. Their filing system for unknown words defaults to alphabetical, so when we read the word “grungy” in a poem, they open up the mental file labeled, “Words Beginning with ‘GR,’ ” reach in, and pull out “grumpy.” Eh, close enough. While this system actually does work for related words some of the time, “close enough” can be quite far indeed.

One afternoon as we cleaned up from lunch, a group of about six kids gathered around the deep red blossom of our newly blooming amaryllis plant. The various plant parts fascinated them and Vanessa leaned in close to examine the pollen-bearing anthers inside the flower. “Aww--they look like little tampons!” she marveled. “Little baby tampons!” I did a double take at what I had heard as I walked by, and waved Vanessa over.

“What are you talking about?” I whispered urgently, shielding our conversation with a batch of paperclipped math tests, horrified and a little confused by her comparison of the amaryllis to feminine hygiene products, especially around a gaggle of eight-year-old boys. “That is a girl thing and a private bathroom-type topic! What are you talking about?”

Vanessa’s “Words That Begin With ‘TA’ And Then Later Have a ‘PO’” folder had let her down. She gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth, genuinely realizing her mistake. “I meant TADPOLES!”