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This past week we had a situation where there was an issue with our policy and a parent. One of our policies at Quemazon is if a child has diarrhea, they need to be picked up as soon as possible and not come back to school until it’s been 24 hours without diarrhea. A child that didn’t appear to be ill ended up having diarrhea. He was sent home. Through much communication, we were told that he often has diarrhea but that doesn’t mean he’s sick. So, since we are mere employees, we aren’t comfortable, nor allowed, to go against policy. So the upper boss was involved. We decided to meet in the middle. If diarrhea is the only symptom he had and as long as he always makes it to the toilet, we will not have him picked up. We try to be as supportive of families as we can without possibly putting other children at risk. Sometimes it can be a delicate balance. 

Today I had two more conferences. One was an older child, and the other was one of my students. The older child’s conference was not overly interesting. She is a well-behaved and very smart girl. They really only talked about her social life. My student, however, was more interesting given the fact that she is developmentally delayed. I do want to note that her parents are not in deline about it, however, they’re not really searching for any kind of diagnosis. They are very receptive to advice and tips. My teacher didn’t mention anything about getting her tested but that might be because she isn’t even close to elementary school yet. Overall, sitting in for these conferences has been interesting for me. I do wish that I had been able to sit in with some other students with behavior problems to better understand how to traverse that situation but that’s okay. I also get information from hearing about the other conferences.  

Today was more involved for sure. I had to come up with an art project that day. I decided on a really cute pizza project. I used paper plates for the dough and then glued red paper on for the sauce. I cut out pepperonis, black olives, green peppers, and pieces of pineapple. Then I mixed paint to look like cheese. They loved it, especially because Wednesdays are pizza days at school. It was awesome, they painted the “cheese” on and put on whatever toppings they wanted. They turned out incredibly good. The kids and parents loved them. 

Today I did the last few hand prints and then a simple scratch art activity. The scratch art is good for their fine motor skills. Not only do they have to hold a skinny stick, but they have to apply pressure. 

No group this week. In after school today, I started on my keychain project. I have shrinky-dink paper and then they got to choose colors for their hand print. If there’s one thing most kids love, it’s having their hand painted. It was slightly labor intensive because I had to use acrylic paint so we had to be extra careful and go wash our hands and brush immediately in between each kid.

After looking through all the classroom materials it’s easy to see how much diversity we have and how much we show diversity to the kids. I’ve heard from so many parents that they just come home spiting all this knowledge they learned and are excited about. It feels really good to know that they enjoy learning. There were boxes for Africa, Australia, North America, and Asia. There are supplies for botany, weather, and science. There are also supplies for all holidays and of course the usuals of dinosaurs and insects and such. There was a lot of awesome practical life material. Practical life work is my favorite type of work. Dressing a baby, ironing, cleaning with a brush, hanging clothes on a drying rack, and a lot more. I think that everything we try todo is diverse and awesome for the kids.

It’s our spring break this week but I was asked to come in to go through and organize the classroom materials. We went through all of the bins for the older kids’ classroom. There were at least 36 bins. It was nice to be able to see and go through the strictly Montessori work and the other educational work. I also found it really interesting to see the difference between the older classes work to the work that my younger kids do. It was also shocking how much stuff was not being used and was just taking up space. I also found it interesting that the teacher of the older kids would comment about somethings being too difficult for her kids when I had seen my kids do that work. It really is interesting and good to learn about how each classroom is different. 

A goal for this coming week is to get hours even though it’s spring break for us. It’s kinda unfortunate that my school and work spring breaks didn’t lineup, but that’s okay, I’m making it work. 🙂

Mid-day group again, of course. The weather was horrible today. It’s almost spring and we had a snowstorm today. Since we would have inclement recess. I decided to design a headband for them. I designed a butterfly (for spring) in a winter hat with snowflakes. I thought it was perfect and the kids loved that fact that the butterfly had a hat. They colored them and I stapled them in to headbands/paper crowns. 

I had mid-day group, the kids are doing it before I’m even ready. We have and have had several dual language learners/bilingual children come through our class. I was curious about helping them more so I took a training course about Dual Language Learning children. It was pretty interesting and I did learn of some ideas that would be really nice and supportive of our DLL students. Although some of the ideas just wouldn’t work for our classroom. First, the course was more geared towards preschool, while my class is younger than preschool age. So, we’re not working on reading or focusing on words. We just focus on learning phonics. The best and most doable idea is to play music in those students home languages. And to support code switching. We don’t want them to think that they aren’t allowed to speak their home languages at school, but I already do that.