Because we started on Tuesday, today (the fifth day of school) was the end of the first week for Specials. I’ve seen every kid in the school once. Or pretty much all of them – a kid was added today, I heard. The last number I saw was 523 students at Carmel Elementary, but that was several days ago and anything can happen!
That’s somewhere around 523 login cards that I made for the kids. In the past, the teachers kindly made the cards, but this year I volunteered to make them. One less thing for teachers to worry about, and because I made them all without using a drop of imagination, they are amazingly, boringly, consistent, which I like in a login card. I did use the bigger size of index cards for the kindergartners, because they’re the ones who will use the cards the longest, and they’re easier to grab out of the drawer that way.
I even made them for the fifth grade, because I’m starting a typing thing tomorrow. The teachers and I want the kids to have typing practice – typing’s no longer taught in school, and those of us who had typing class (or keyboarding), back in the day, are a little concerned. It’s possible that as a society we’re placing a little too much stock in the fact that the kids like to play on computers so much, and we trust that they have greater skills than they do. I’ve had fourth graders ask me how to move the cursor from one line to the next, in Word. (Answer: Hit the return button. Response: Ohhhh!) So my thinking is that we’ll start with one of the typing programs that we link to on our fourth-grade weblinks page, have the kids do a typing test and write down their numbers on their login card (see, it all makes sense now!), and then have 5 minutes of practice.
Last week every day went at the speed of light, but today things were a little slower. I breathed a couple of times, took a couple sips of my water. . . . NWEA testing is going on, so I’ve been kicked out of my computer lab for the two- week duration. I’m in the temporary computer lab – an unused classroom in which the efficient and effective Ms. Barney has set up laptops for me. We ran into a couple of issues – one keyboard wouldn’t type the letter A, one wouldn’t type 0 (the zero). Why? Who knows. Wouldn’t have been an issue since we weren’t really typing much today, but you can’t log in when your name has an A in it, or your password a 0…. Plus, not a sadist, to make kids take typing tests with non-functioning A and 0 keys!
Today a first grader asked me if we were going to play Pokemon. “Umm, no,” I said. “WHY would we play Pokemon?”
“Because I want to!” he said, looking at me with his big disingenuous eyes.
Umm, no. Lots of other fun stuff though I PROMISE.
Best. Job. Ever. But I am so so tired.
First weeks of school are very exhausting. Glad you survived to tell about it.