I had a first grade class for two days this week, which left me with these precious moments:
Blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy: I'm Mexican.
Another kid: Me too. Do you know how to say taco in Spanish? Burrito!
Me: Class, what's a foal?
Boy: It's a baby pony!
Girl: No, it's a baby horse. A pony gots the horn on its head.
We were working on a fun little activity called "Everyone is Special." On the first page they were to write their name and than finish the line, "I am...."
The blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy from before wrote, "I am fragool." (At first I thought he was trying to write "frugal," but he said it's "fragile." I wasn't expecting a first grader to use either to describe himself.) I asked him what was another thing that he could put. His response: "I am... cute?" Well, there's no arguing that one.
I gave them a pretty tough math problem one day: There are 9 apples in a tree. If 3 of them fall out, how many are left?
One kid was very adamant that it was 7, despite everyone else saying it was 6, including me. He showed me on his hands. He put up 5 fingers on one hand and 4 on the other. When he put his 3 middle fingers down, he brought his thumb up, giving him 7. It took a while to explain to him why that was wrong.
The math problem the next day was just as hard: my mom made 12 cookies. My sister ate 7 of them. How many cookies are left for me?
I asked one kid what his answer was and how he got it.
"5?"
"How did you get that?"
"7?"
"How did you get that?"
"7!"
"7 is not an answer to how you solved your problem."
This one took a while as well.
Class dismissed!
