"Something smells funny..."

Today the kids in my class were making a model of groundwater. They actually sparked the idea- I wasn't planning to do it- but they asked why there was clay in the ground. To them, clay is something you play with- not something you'd dig up underground.

I realized I had some clay leftover from our sink/float exercise, so I pressed it into the middle of a clear plastic cup, and then poured water on the top so they could see what happened. They kept asking questions, and- well, I realized that we had almost all of the materials to make a model of the underground layers and aquifers. So the students read the book an extra time and used the pictures to make a plan of their model. After they built it, I tried to "pollute" it with some water and food coloring, but the aquifers stayed pretty clean.

While we were building, one of the kids commented that something smelled funny. I explained that it was probably the soil I'd picked up from the store. "No," they told me, "I think it's the clay." One boy sniffed it and told me, "It smells like something... not school" and I didn't know what he meant until the next boy said, "It smells like," (in a whisper) "weed."

Wonderful. Glad to know our 8 year old kids recognize the smell of marijuana.

Anyway, I seem to have more teaching followers lately. I'm not great at every aspect of teaching, but I ROCKED the science lessons for the Water unit this summer. It's about a week's worth of awesome, thanks in large part to a Project WET workshop I attended, and if anyone's interested, I'll share. All of the lessons were pretty easy to implement, very hands-on, lasted 30 minutes or less, and while they might have cost a little at first- most of the materials could be used again from year to year.

A highlight I'm definitely interested in sharing is an experiment in mixing oil and water, and then tying it to the recent oil disaster in the Gulf. Let me know if you'd like me to post it!

rewind

My car is a '95. It was owned by a friend's grandmother before me, and therefore has a stereo that includes a radio and a player for cassette tapes.

My neighbor, who's 5 or 6 years old, rode with me in the car the other day, and pointed to the tape sticking out of the dash, asking me, "What's that?"

I explained to her that it was a tape, and that's what they put music on before there were CD's. She nodded, and then said she didn't really like the song that was on, and asked if she could hit the number 6 to go to the 6th song on the tape. I had to explain that tapes didn't work that way.

The funny part was that tapes were such a novel idea to her that she seemed to think learning about them was cool.

oh, the times they are a changin'

Me: Do you know what it means to use context clues?
Students: *blank stares*
Me: Any ideas at all?
Student: Well, I know what text means.
Me: (excited) Oh! That's great. What does text mean?
Student: Like, on your cell phone...

let it snow

(I'm the one in the pink coat on the front sled with my dad and little brother.)


One winter, when I was in second grade, my family went sledding with two families from our church. We've always done a lot with these two families- even now, we eat pizza once a week with one of them, and see the other family at least twice a year for camping and winter camping (they now live in a different state).

At home, I live just down the street from a park with plenty of great sledding hills. They're usually packed full of people after a big snow, but we would usually walk down there, too. This particular year, we'd met up with the other two families and we'd all spent a few hours careening down the hills, fighting over who got the good sleds, trying to see who could get the farthest, and steering to avoid trees and other sledders.

Finally, the parents told us that it was time to go. All of the kids, of course, were numb to the cold, too- but didn't want to leave. We begged for one last run down the hill, and the adults relented. "Just one last time," they reminded us.

I took off down the hill, sitting in a long, orange sled, enjoying the feeling of the wind and snowflakes in my face as I slid over the snow. When I'd finally reached the bottom, I trudged back up the hill, pulling the sled behind me by a rope attached to it.

As I walked up the hill for the last time, as I'd done so many times just that day, another sled came barrelling down the hill diagonally, almost running into me. The sled narrowly missed me, but the rope of my sled caught on their sled. Their sled kept going, and my rope tried to go with it, yanking my arm hard.

I started crying almost immediately, and hurried up the hill, holding my arm. The parents regretted letting us go down "one last time" when they realized I needed to go to the emergency room.

I only ended up with a badly sprained right arm. The doctors said it was almost broken, and so for weeks afterwards my arm was wrapped up and put in a Snoopy sling. I got out of doing some handwriting assignments at school, and I remember thinking that was awesome.

Since then, my family went sledding one more time together. On that trip, my older brother chipped a tooth badly. After that, my parents decided it was best to take a break from sledding for awhile, and we didn't go for a few years. And after that, we were old enough that we sometimes preferred hanging out with our friends to our family, so we've never really gone again. I did go once with friends in high school, but it's been awhile since I've gone sledding.

Last week I started going into an elementary school for my teaching classes. The first day we went, there was a small amount of snow on the ground, and the kids were so excited. My third graders were all telling me stories of playing in the snow in the past, or writing about what they were going to do after school.

It's snowing again today, and I overheard some college students making plans to go sledding. It reminded me of this story, and made me smile.