Two thumbs down

Actually the morning would have been ranked worse if I had more thumbs....

I had one little boy screaming because he'd gotten a cylinder stuck in the cylinder block for 6th time this week and I refused to help him get it out and told him he needed to fix it before doing another work.

Then I had another child who had already maxed out my patience quota with touching things he hadn't been shown yet. Please not that we have had two months of school where this has been the rule and it wasn't even yet 10 o'clock in the morning.

And then there was a third child who for some reason was having some sort of drooling epidemic. Saliva on his sweatshirt neck, saliva soaking his sleeves, saliva on the mystery bag and table...yuck.

And on top of that add the multitude of other children just up to the usual preschool antics of being silly, experimenting and not always paying attention to what they're doing.

So yeah, a double thumbs down day.

So what did I do?

Left the one child crying, sent the other out in the hallway with the aide to practice listening, armed the last one with a tissue and steered him to the sink. Then I got to deal with the regular hazards of the day....by making a book?

Yep. When all else fails I like to just sit down and start working on something. It always draws a crowd and I get something done! So today I sorted newly laminated cards and then put the ones for our new "Vertebrates and Invertebrates" book in order. One special child got to walk to the conference room to fetch the book binding equipment. Then they all watched excitedly as I punch and bound the pages.

Bonus; I then rotated the new book and cards out for our previous biology activity (living and non-living) and set two of the four year olds to work breaking it in....looking back I don't recall how they actually did but at least they were busy for a bit!

So, that didn't exactly solve all the problems, but it did keep everyone busy and let them settle in so the morning went from a double thumbs down to at least neutral.

That's a win, right?