Halloween, Eels and Bigfoot

Okay, not to talk about my students 24/7, but they have been pretty hilarious lately. One thing about teaching is that you have to have a sense humor to keep your sanity.

Exhibit A:

I looove Halloween, so I played it up quite a bit in my class. I read spooky stories and went the whole 9 yards: lights off, a creepy flashlight under my chin, scratchy voice and jumping out to scare the kids once the tension was high. They ate it up. Then we wrote scary stories, which the kids also loved- some a little too much. This story was too gross for school, but the kid was SO dang proud of his "scary" writing, I couldn't burst his bubble too much. He sincerely thought I would love this literary masterpiece (see below):

This lovely story obviously involves someone's head being chopped off by a half man-half pig. (Your typical scary, Halloween story.) The student was very excited to hear what I thought of his story.

"It was pretty gory!" I told him.

"What's gory mean? . . . Does that mean really spooky?"

"Yeah . . . more like lots of blood and guts."

Thinking this was the best compliment ever, and with a huge smile: "Oh yeah! It was gory."

Exhibit B:

Our new science unit is on measuring time. They students made a chart about what they wanted to know and thought they knew about time, and then wrote about how school would be different if we didn't have clocks. Then, they were to draw a picture of what comes to their mind when they think of time. Grading the science journals, I came across the following:

(The speech balloon says: "stuff fun". I have no idea what to make of this.)

Exhibit C:

Another interesting entry in a science student journal was when I asked kids to sketch the Vinegar Eels we observed under microscopes. Apparently, even though the Eels look like tiny worms wriggling around, this student decided to sketch this (and provide random finger prints all over, just in case further identification was needed):

Exhibit D:

And staying with the science theme, this little delight is from when we used different objects to attempt to magnify a newspaper clipping (to see what kind of objects/characteristics will work as magnifiers). The students were suppose to draw the objects we experimented with: cylinder, cube, sphere, and phallic symbol:

And last, but not least . . . from our wonderful field trip to Starved Rock we find this little gem. We toured a lock and damn, went to a one room school house, visited historical Native American sites, hikes some forest trails, and . . .