My students are cute.  Everyday I have such a great time in the classroom with my 4th graders.  Even if I’m having a terrible day, they always manage to make me smile or laugh.  And it isn’t even because they’re trying to cheer me up.  It’s just the way they are.

Take for example one day in Social Studies.  I was reviewing vocabulary words with them from the chapter.  I asked them, “Who can tell me what metropolitan means?”  One of them leapt up from his seat, and stuck his hand straight out frantically and said, “Sister!! Sister!! I know!! I know!!”  I asked him what it meant, and he said so confidently,

“It’s place where you sell a lot of poultry.”


So close, yet so far away.

Just yesterday I was testing them in the computer labs on some of the skills we had practiced throughout the semester.  I asked them all to find me a synonym for the word “smelly” hoping they would use thesaurus.com/  They were all so lost and confused, without an idea of how to even spell synonym.  Finally one of them asked me, “Sister, how do you spell thesaurus?”  Yes!, I thought, a student who is going in the right direction.  “T-H-E-S-A-U-R-U-S” I waited for him to type, a page loaded, and he called me over to show me what he had found.

Synonym_Synonym

No! No! No!  He looked up the synonyms for ’synonym’.  I tried not to laugh, and told him his mistake.  I asked him once more, “Find a synonym for smelly.”  He went back to work.  He called me over again and this time he was closer;  he searched for ’synonym of smelly’.  hehehehe.  I gave him his points.  Clearly he was trying.

And finally, today in Social Studies we were discussing the 13 colonies and the crops that they grew.  They didn’t know how to pronounce tobacco, or what it was for that matter.  So I explained to them it was plant whose leaves you could dry and put in cigarettes.  One of them raised her hand and said, “Oh, I know!  You can put it in a pipe and smoke it; then you’ll get cancer!”  Very well said.

I don’t know.  Maybe it’s just me.  Maybe I know them so I find it amusing.  But I definitely think, my students are cute.