Saturday, September 19, 2009

first grade demands

in first grade my fabulous co-teacher and i begrudgingly began to have snack between reading and writing workshop in the afternoons. our kiddos each lunch at 10:40 and we start reading workshop at 11:30 and work hard on reading and writing until 2. which you think would be enough time for them to live without food, but this turned out not to be true.

we learned this the first week of school when one little one held up his banana and announced he was hungry.
"great!" she said, "you can eat that when you get home!"

this turned out to be too long to wait because at the end of the day there was a banana peel in the trash can. my friend had snuck a banana. somehow he'd gotten an entire banana out of his book bag, eaten the entire banana, and then left behind the remains. (one would ask, if you bother to sneak a banana, wouldn't you bother to hide the evidence?)

we decided, if the poor guy was desperate enough to sneak a banana (i mean, it wasn't cheetos) he must really have been hungry, and so we implemented a short snack time.

so, we use this 5-7 minutes to do a read-aloud. we finished gooney bird greene early this week but hadn't found another book to read yet. for two days one girl read to the class, and yesterday we were just going to let them chat because, well, it was friday and we were tired.

as we chatted in the front of the room about their horrid behavior that day and what we wanted to do next in writing, we heard

"excuse me! isn't anybody going to read a story around here?"

it was, of course, the banana friend.

rude, and breaking class rules, but how do you not love the fact the kid was demanding a book?

we quickly found something to read and all was right with the world.

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