Treasure Hunting, week 6

Today we talked about being angry, and ways to express and deal with anger. Which, to be fair, is a useful sort of thing to talk about, but it feels very weird to me in a religious education class.

Yeah, I'm still having issues with the curriculum. So sue me.

We had 12 students and one guest, despite the absolutely icky weather (seriously, you could close your eyes for three seconds and the cloud you were watching would completely vanish over the horizon, the wind was that strong) and today's project was making sock puppets. I think the theory behind that was to have a 'friend' to whom you could freely express your anger, since, well, it's a sock and won't get hurt if you yell or pull at it. In any case, it left a godawful mess of glue, string, felt, and googly eyes to clean up.

Story time was... long. It's hard to keep a lid on that many kids when at least half of them are determined to act up and generally be noisy and wriggle around. I find myself ignoring certain other kids simply because they're not being immediate problems, which is bad of me, I know. I try to make sure I call on them and talk to them, but sometimes it's so nice not to have to hush them or grab them that they just slide into the background.

The 'story' was I Was So Mad, which is less a story than a collection of incidents that would make a child angry. It's an audience participation sort of thing -- you read a page, say "Would that make you mad? Yeah, that would make me angry too," and then go to the next one. It apparently ends with a song, which kind of caught me by surprise, and I skipped it in the interests of saving time. We shared incidents from the past week that made us angry or happy, talked about things you might do when angry (and whether they were okay or not), and then did a little relaxation exercise. It was supposed to be a guided meditation (oy!) but the tape was missing so we went with the fallback option.

Frankly, I think the fallback option was the better one, but I didn't write the curriculum, so what do I know? *grumble*

Class ends at 11:45am, and with most other classes, you can be done with cleanup by noon, but for this group I'm lucky to get out of the room by 12:15pm, especially on days when the projects involve glue. Oh god, the glue. I swear, someday I am going to have repetetive stress nightmares of washing glue out of paintbrushes and they'll never get clean...

Treasure Hunting, week 6

Today we talked about being angry, and ways to express and deal with anger. Which, to be fair, is a useful sort of thing to talk about, but it feels very weird to me in a religious education class.

Yeah, I'm still having issues with the curriculum. So sue me.

We had 12 students and one guest, despite the absolutely icky weather (seriously, you could close your eyes for three seconds and the cloud you were watching would completely vanish over the horizon, the wind was that strong) and today's project was making sock puppets. I think the theory behind that was to have a 'friend' to whom you could freely express your anger, since, well, it's a sock and won't get hurt if you yell or pull at it. In any case, it left a godawful mess of glue, string, felt, and googly eyes to clean up.

Story time was... long. It's hard to keep a lid on that many kids when at least half of them are determined to act up and generally be noisy and wriggle around. I find myself ignoring certain other kids simply because they're not being immediate problems, which is bad of me, I know. I try to make sure I call on them and talk to them, but sometimes it's so nice not to have to hush them or grab them that they just slide into the background.

The 'story' was I Was So Mad, which is less a story than a collection of incidents that would make a child angry. It's an audience participation sort of thing -- you read a page, say "Would that make you mad? Yeah, that would make me angry too," and then go to the next one. It apparently ends with a song, which kind of caught me by surprise, and I skipped it in the interests of saving time. We shared incidents from the past week that made us angry or happy, talked about things you might do when angry (and whether they were okay or not), and then did a little relaxation exercise. It was supposed to be a guided meditation (oy!) but the tape was missing so we went with the fallback option.

Frankly, I think the fallback option was the better one, but I didn't write the curriculum, so what do I know? *grumble*

Class ends at 11:45am, and with most other classes, you can be done with cleanup by noon, but for this group I'm lucky to get out of the room by 12:15pm, especially on days when the projects involve glue. Oh god, the glue. I swear, someday I am going to have repetetive stress nightmares of washing glue out of paintbrushes and they'll never get clean...

fashion meme

Gacked from annearchy:

( fashion personality test meme )

This is... I'd say scarily accurate, except if you know me at all, this analysis of my fashion sense/style is so blindingly obvious that it would only be scary if somebody came up with a different answer.

Hmmm. Must send this to Vicky and see what she gets. Vicky, unlike me, actually bothers with fashion. (This is not to say I don't like looking good. I just don't put much effort into it. I'm in favor of buying decent clothes and then just making sure my colors match in the morning. Beyond that, who wants to spend the time?)

fashion meme

Gacked from annearchy:

( fashion personality test meme )

This is... I'd say scarily accurate, except if you know me at all, this analysis of my fashion sense/style is so blindingly obvious that it would only be scary if somebody came up with a different answer.

Hmmm. Must send this to Vicky and see what she gets. Vicky, unlike me, actually bothers with fashion. (This is not to say I don't like looking good. I just don't put much effort into it. I'm in favor of buying decent clothes and then just making sure my colors match in the morning. Beyond that, who wants to spend the time?)