All My Children

I work with kids all day, from Kinder all the way up to Grade 12—and no matter how old they are, they keep me on my toes! Here is another installment of the things my kids say.

-We were talking about cold-blooded vs. warm-blooded animals in my Grade 4/5 ESL class and I asked the kids to list some cold-blooded animals. They rattled off fish, snakes, and so on. When someone mentioned lizards, one kid said nonchalantly, “I like to smash their heads with a rock.” That kind of killed the mood…literally! J

-I was gone one morning to go to the clinic, but came back to school for my afternoon ESL class. When a couple of the boys saw me, there was much moaning and groaning and “Miss Nutt, I thought you were sick so we couldn’t have ESL!” Yup, I’m loved…overwhelmingly so.

-We were talking about different thing that we’ve eaten and one of the Grade 1 kids said, “My mom ate worms once.” After that comment, I brought up the book How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell, which totally disgusted them. Apparently raw worms are acceptable to eat, but fried worms are not.

-In my Grade 6 ESL class, we tackle a different writing project each term, so this last term, I decided to do a book report. This was the conversation that happened just before I told them we would be doing a book report:

“Can we write something?” (Well, knock me over with a feather, they actually want to write!) “Something fun?”

Me: “Of course! Everything we do in ESL is fun!”

Dead silence (which is quite impressive for this group) as they stared at me in disbelief. Clearly their idea of fun and mine don’t exactly line up.

-My Grade 1 ESL kids learned about the five senses this last term, so we talked a lot about things we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. I asked the class what their favourite smell was; one boy said, “Noodles!” (That’s his favourite food, favourite thing to smell, favourite thing to taste…you get the picture.) 

My kids, enjoying their Mexican fiesta food!