Something to Make Monday Great!

On most days I eat lunch with my students. It creates a day with no breaks until the kids go home but I definitely enjoy it. Lately I have been switching between one of two grade one classes at Shikaoi Elementery School. A lot of what happens at lunch revolves around students' craving for attention. On the rare occasion this is manifested through poor behaviour; it definately gets the person in authority's attention when you threaten to through food. However, the majority of the time the kids turn into perfect angels, in fact, sometimes things go a bit far in the other direction and they get scrapy. Everyone wants to show me where to sit; everyone wants to clear my dishes; everyone wants to sit beside me. I have learned pretty well to navigate these potential landmines with promises of "next time" or just doing it myself. I also love observing the culture surrounding lunch time the kids have created from their imagination. For instance, on the milkbox there meaningless single digit number - probably a lot number - every lunch it's imperative to share that number and check for matches. In case you think this is an orgainized process, you're wrong, it consists of yelling out your number and thus I end up answering the same question several times. During lunch the kids love love love creating quizes for each other, the broader the topic range the better, but this is in light of a 6/7 year old's world that consists of school and home. My most successful question today was asking my group if "Blair likes space vegtables?" which had the group evenly split and created a lively discussion. Wouldn't this type of lunch make anyone happy? It makes me tired just thinking about it, but I digress: Today everyone was in high spirits because today's school lunch was curry-and-rice. A meal that's very hard to mess up and thus is always tasty and filling.