Just a few reasons why life in a third grade classroom is *always* interesting...

Today was the first day back after a ten day vacation (including weekends). Typically third graders return in one of two states after a long vacation: either they are so well rested that they are hyper and chatty and filled with pent up energy, or they are exhausted from a less than normal schedule and return quiet and ready to resume the structures and routines of our classroom. This time they were chatty and hyper right off the bat. Of course, it might have had something to do with the donuts that were (I kid you not) twice the size of the Dunkin Donuts kind that a parent sent in to celebrate her daughter's birthday. Despite my explicitly stated rule that there are to be no food related treats to celebrate birthdays. Don't parents understand that even though I am trained to use an epipen I'd prefer not to when one of my students goes into an anaphalactic shock from eating something they are allergic to? Nope, apparently not.

But that isn't even what made life in our little classroom community so interesting. Today, in the middle of my math instruction, I intercepted a note passed by one of my little girls to one of my boys. I took it away and threw it in the trash, but my curiousity later won out and I retrieved it. (Before you are grossed out by that, it was at the top and nothing else had been thrown away.) The note read:
S-
I saw A put his hands down his pants and touch his wiener.

So, of course, upon reading this note I did what any good teacher would do.
I showed it to as many of my colleagues as I could. (OK, OK, I also took some other, more appropriate, teacher action, but that is too boring to mention). The best reaction? My principal who indicated that I should have her correct her spelling. (Don't worry, he was kidding.)

But the day doesn't end there.... nope, it gets still more interesting! Today was also the first day of Reading Celebration week. My students got to write on a Graffitti wall (it was a VERY large piece of paper stretched around a VERY long bulletin board), and list their favorite book and draw a picture to match. Well, apparently, one of my boys drew a picture of Calvin and Hobbes. He drew a speech bubble coming out of Calvin's mouth with the words F*$! repeated several times. Nope, I didn't catch this at the time. Maybe I should have but the bulletin board is huge people, and my class was not clustered together, they were spread everywhere and we were under a time limit. So I didn't catch it at the time. But boy did I hear about it later. From one of my colleagues, and from the parent who had to correct the mistake. I'm sure I'll be hearing about it tomorrow too because apparently it caused quite a stir among another third grade class, and you all know how rumors fly....

At least I can't say I'm bored!