Amazing kids

More examples of why my kids are the best in the WHOLE WORLD!!!

Reason #1: This week the fourth and fifth graders have been coming to our room to read different stories as a part of our book week activities. My kids have been pretty well behaved, only fidgeting a little, which for my kids should count as their first miracle toward sainthood, and haven't bothered the reader at all about being able to see the pictures. The best part though has been after the reader finishes the book every student, with zero prompting, has clapped enthusiastically for the reader. Many even say, "Thank you, name of student!" It makes my heart swell with pride that they know how to be a good audience, how to make others feel good about the work that they do. We've worked on this SO much in the past two years, it's good to see them putting it into practice on their own.

Reason #2: About two weeks ago we were sitting around at carpet time working on our skip counting. We practiced our 2's, 5's, 10's, 20's, 25's, 50's, 100's and had started working on 3's, which by the way are pretty tough. Then I kind of forgot what I was doing for a moment and started saying, "What's 1+1?" "2", the responded. "2+2"? "4" (ha!, I typed 3 there at first and luckily caught the typo before making a HUGE fool out of myself) :) I kept going, "4+4"? "8" No worries so far. At "8+8" I realized my folly. They responded "16" with no problem. Just to try them out I asked, "16+16"? One girl answered, "32". O.k. let's see how far this goes. "16+16"? At "64+64" we had to start writing the problem down, but since we've been doing two digit addition anyway they didn't have a problem with that. The story continues up to them answering 16,??? (can't remember what the rest of the 16,??? is), to get an answer of 32 thousand something. I was really impressed. My six and seven year olds were doing five digit addition. They were carrying digits to the next place value. About the only thing they had a hard time with was saying the answer because we haven't started naming numbers in the thousands yet. As if that wasn't enough when we finished doing that they asked if we could do multiplication. Some of their older siblings are doing it and we've done simple stuff like the five's, ten's, zero's, and one's before. So we did some multiplying by two's, three's, and four's. Once they found out that they can draw pictures they figured things out pretty quickly. They didn't do any by themself but were able to tell me what to do as a class. It was great! And then, the coup de grax, (spelling?), one girl had written about doing division in her journal the other day and so they asked if they could do some division. We did 25/5. And again, once they realized they could draw pictures they figured it out pretty well. We only had time to do one but they, my six and seven year olds, figured out a division problem. They amaze me.

Reason #3: The boys, instead of seeing silly rhymes when they see the girls underpants, turn their eyes and whisper to me that someone needs to sit in a chair. That's a lot more mature than I was in first grade.

And so many other things that they do each and every day that make me smile at what a great group I've been able to work with over the past two years.