Insect lunch
...written on 07.03.04, @ 1:54 a.m.
Friday July 2, 2004
Something spooky happened on Wednesday with my P2 class. These are 4 and 5 year olds. We were learning actions: pet the rabbit, hold the bird, pick up the turtle, put down the hamster, etc. We were playing with several puppets and I asked them to pick them all up, which they did. Their arms were bulging with them and then they proceeded to give them all to me. I started clowning and "fell over" with the weight of them all. And then out of the best Hitchcock or Children of the Corn movie, they all started this maniacal laughter and kept smothering me with these toys! Fuhreeky!
So, today I teetered on the edge of disaster. Well, let's calm down, since teaching English to 4 & 5 year olds is not brain surgery, ok, I goofed. I didn't think something through enough.
Today's lesson was "I like cats." "Not me, I like hamsters." I had planned on warming them up with the Red/Yellow game and a deck of cards with veggies and fruits on them. I would say, "I like broccoli!", and if they agreed, they were to jump to the yellow line and say "Me, too!" or if they disagreed, to the red line and say "Not me!"
Well, I didn't grab the right cards before class and I didn't want to leave class to get them, so I decided to make due with a basket of fruits and veggies that we have in the classroom. The kids lunged at the fruit, took it all out of the basket and started playing with it. Forget the red and yellow lines, but at least they were holding the fruit up to my face and saying "Strawberry!" "Pineapple!" etc. and I went where they wanted to go with it for a while and asked them if they liked strawberries or pineapple and said "me too" if someone showed me a fruit that I liked, or "not me" if someone picked up an apple. The trick was getting the KIDS to know, understand and practice the phrase "Not me!"
I asked everyone to clean up and told them to get their activity books, that we were going to color. I grabbed six boxes of crayons and handed them to little Masato who was trying to assure me that he needed only one box of crayons, but I finally got it across that he was "Crayon Boy" and that when his classmates said "Crayons, please", he was to hand them a box, say "Here you are.", wait for a "Thank you" and then say, "You're welcome".
We looked at the page we were going to color. It had pictures of cookies, cakes, milk, juice, socks, shoes, shorts, and monsters. The kids were supposed to color the things that they wanted to eat. Still not willing to say "die", I pretended like I was picking a pair of shoes off the page to eat. "Yum! Yum!" I said, and most of the girls shook their heads and said "No" despite my gentle "not me" proddings.
Then it came to me, I reached behind me and pulled the vinyl tube of plastic insects to my left side, reached inside and pulled out a praying mantis. "Yum, yum!" I said as I pretended to squish it in my teeth. "Do you want a praying mantis?" I said as I flew the insect through the air making a direct route to one of the girls' mouths. She was taken aback by the absurdity of it and didn't even manage to say "no", which provided me with the opportunity to cross my wrists and say with a scowl, "Not me!". "Not me!" she giggled. I then picked up a fly and went after the next girl, "Not me!", giggled she as well. Next a beetle, "not me!", then it was Masato's turn and a scorpion went diving into his open mouth. He of course liked all of the insects I had on hand and that was great because it provided me with a good counterpoint to what I was doing.
Even little Kanami, who after ten weeks still doesn't do the Supertots song at the beginning of class, who rarely participates in any of the games we play, who came to the potluck party and ate and drank nothing and spoke to noone and cried in her mother's arms afterwards, and who doesn't like to say "Crayons, please", manifested an ever so slight change of expression that dared me to hope . . . I picked up a lady bug and sailed it towards her mouth, "Do you want to eat a ladybug?" "Not me!" she said. That made my entire year. After class she even sat close to the others who were waiting on their moms and when her sister came to get her, spontaneously said "See you!"
Great Buddha, who would have thought those insects would have been such a big hit? . . . Not me!