Unorthodox lessons and vocabularial (it's a word!) blunders

Earlier this week, I taught my kids about pee.

Tired of the endless stream (no pun intended) of kids who come back in after recess or after lunch and, five minutes later, tell me with crossed legs, "Miss Hillary, I have to go the baaaathroom! It's an emerrrrrrgency!", I sat them all down for a lesson.

"Boys and girls, when we eat our food, most of it gets used by our bodies. But some of the food we eat, our bodies can't use, and it comes out as waste. What do we call that waste?"

Mostly I got some blank stares, but one boy, thinking he was giving a silly answer, giggled out, "POOP!"

"Bingo! You're right! It's poop!"

His eyes popped open, I'm sure shocked that he was right.

"And what ELSE comes out as waste?"

A chorus answered me thios time: "PEEEE!"

"You betcha! Boys and girls, todaaaay we're going to learn... about PEE!"

I proceeded to teach them about how when we eat and drink, our food goes into our stomach, into our intestines, and the nutrients go into our bodies to make us strong and help us grow. Some of the waste fills up in a part of our bodies called our bladders.

When we pee, we empty out our bladders, and then it's empty. Slowly, slowly, it begins to fill up again, especially after we eat and drink. When it's only half full, our bladder doesn't really tell our brains we have to go pee. But when it's full - EMERGENCY!

I wrote out an example of a daily schedule for the kids and showed them the times in the day that are good times to go to the bathroom. We talked about how your brain might not be saying "EMERGENCY!!!" but that, "I promise! There's probably something in there! And if you try, I'll bet something will come out!"

It was quite hilarious, and I'm 110% positive that this was the one and only lesson I've taught all year that EVERYBODY has paid attention to. Hopefully, at least now when I say, "Go and try anyway!" I can refer to this lesson and they'll understand why I say that!

Sidenote: I'm also veeery curious what the answers were if the kids were asked, "So, little Johnny, what did you learn about in school today?" HA!

Well, today I discovered that even my little monkey with serious attention difficulties picked up at least SOMETHING from my lesson.

He's working on learning the letters of the alphabet (oh yes, in grade two), and today he was working on U. He doesn't have a very expansive vocabulary, either, so he was having trouble with figuring out what the picture was.

"Miss Hillary, it's a cow."

"Well, yes, but look at the arrow - what part of the cow is it pointing to?"

"......... oh! It is a bladder?!"

CUTE!

"Ah! Good guess! I can tell you're really thinking about it! But a bladder is inside the body, and that's the part that holds the pee. This part is on the outside, and it's where the milk comes out. This part is called an udder. U-u-udder. Does it start like 'u-u-up?' "

"Yes! ... but Max* told me it was his tentacle."

Hmm. I'm prrreeetty sure Max didn't mean 'tentacle.'

I think just found the subject for my next lesson!

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* Names have been changed