Scallywags, Snakes, and Sewing

That's what my day consisted of. I had some academics planned, but that all went by the wayside. There were FAR more interesting things to do!

The whole morning, my students watched Treasure Island with the resource/learning assistance teacher. All except the kids who were behind. I was the big meanie teacher who have them a list of like 15 recent assignments on Friday and told them that if they weren't done, they'd be staying with me for the duration of the movie to get caught up. And forget heading to the movie once they finished. Once the movie started, if you were in, you were in, if not, you'd be working. So I suppose the scallywags were in the movie, but also could be applied to the 10 or so kids who got to stay back with me to finish their work. Yaaarg.

After recess until lunch consisted of snakes. About 10 of them, to be specific. Live ones. The "Snake Guy" came from the something or other society for the protection of reptiles and talked a little big about the snakes, answered some questions, then let the kids hold them and play with them. Highlights? Might have been the snake that wrapped itself around one of my kids' head like a headband then tied his tail in a knot. Or perhaps the snake that crawled into the desk and tucked himself into a student's zippered binder. When we pulled the binder out of the desk, the snake was through all three binder rings, and had begun trying to escape by turning around and trying to slither out the same way he got in.... and then proceeded to get stuck. We had to perform a reptilian rescue! Dah da-da daaah! Another super cool thing was watching as one snake slithered its way out of its skin right as we were watching. I have a few long sections of intact snakeskin that we'll look at in a microscope later this week. Very cool!

We spent the majority of the afternoon learning how to cut fabric from a pattern, thread needles, stitch, and tie off the thread: we're making mini pants and shirts for one of the characters in our novel. I don't know HOW many masses of tangled thread I undid this afternoon. It was pretty funny to watch them try to figure it out.

Good times. Good times.

Eh, we'll do academics tomorrow...