The End of the Year

One of the second-grade objectives is to discuss inventors and inventions. Another is to formulate "how?" questions--the beginnings of scientific inquiry. So this week I gave the students a challenge. I gave each table of children (six tables in all) some supplies--a double-A battery, a flashlight lightbulb, and aluminum foil. I told them to try to invent something.
A girl at one of the tables made the important discovery that if she wrapped the battery in the foil, the battery became warm. (In fact, the battery can get quite hot. Impressionable youth that may be reading this: this is an experiment that should only be attempted with adult supervision!) Some minutes later, a whoop of triumph came from a girl at another table: she had succeeded in getting the flashlight lightbulb to "spark," as she put it. Soon all the tables were giving her method a shot. Some could replicate her results, some couldn't; it's tricky to get the metal rim of the lightbulb to stay in contact with the foil, and to keep the foil in contact with both ends of the battery. But it's pretty darn cool when it works.
I asked them to try to explain what happened. One boy (who said he helps his dad with electric stuff all the time) said that the foil reflected the light from the lights on the ceiling, and that's what gave the lightbulb the necessary electricity; that, plus of course the nitrogen gas inside the battery.
We have five days left. Everything that needs to be graded has already been assigned, already turned in. The trick now is to continue our routine as closely as possible so as not to encourage more craziness than will naturally happen in the final week of school. That means we will still do language arts and science and social studies in the morning and we will still do math in the afternoon. I will still give out worksheets. The class has not yet risen up in mutiny.
We had a school concert yesterday afternoon. One of the songs was a Motown-inspired declaration of love for pizza (imagine first-through-fifth graders harmonizing "Pizza! Pizza!" to the tune of "My Girl", and you'll get the general gist). I was able to handle it up until the point a young'un went to the mike and started intoning a spoken part mid-song. Then I gave out a helpless cry of laughter that prompted a bunch of students to turn around--"Oh," I saw their thought balloons saying. "It was a teacher!"
Also enjoyable: a song about proper handwashing techniques set to the melody of Beyonce's "Single Ladies."

Of Rainstorms and Rossini

The recent spate of bad weather in Cincinnati reminds me I have neglected to share a story from a week or two back in the second grade classroom, a day when I was flying solo (my mentor having to be in another room). It was a day when we didn't have "specials"--art or music or gym. We had done our math work as always just after lunch; I believe after that we were doing something related to social studies, but in the middle of it a massive storm hit. There was thunder, there was lightning, there was wind and great pelting raindrops. I was unprepared for everyone's reaction--one student asked to sit elsewhere in the room instead of next to the windows because she was afraid of thunderstorms. Other boys and girls were getting up to go stand at the windows to get a better view. It was chaos. So I said, "Everyone back to your seats, and I will tell you a story."
Magic words. I said, "Let me tell you what Miss Pancella's mother did when Miss Pancella was a little girl and there was a storm. Miss Pancella's mother--Mrs. Pancella--is a very wise woman. She knows a lot about calming the fears of children. I believe she became so wise because she had, not one--" I raised an index finger--"Not two"--I continued counting off and showed the count on my hands--"not three, or four, or five, but SIX children." Gasps of astonishment all around. "And Miss Pancella is not her first, not her second...but the sixth! So she had plenty of practice before I came around.
"When Miss Pancella was a little girl and a thunderstorm rolled through, Mrs. Pancella put a record on the record player. Who here knows what a record is?"
A little boy raised his hand. When I called on him, he said, "It's like a CD, only bigger."
"Close enough. This record was of the William Tell Overture. Now, you've probably heard part of the William Tell Overture--" I hummed part of the ending, the "Lone Ranger" portion. The class all agreed--yes, they knew it. "That part sounds like galloping horses; the beginning part sounds like the approach of a storm. There are low drums for far-away thunder, and notes that are like drops of rain--plink, plink, plink! And cymbal crashes for lightning. Mrs. Pancella would play that whole record so we could listen to the storm come and go. Somehow a storm was less scary when it was in music."
"Hey!" somebody called. "The rain stopped!"
Everyone looked out the windows and confirmed it. There was a brief outbreak of chaos again as everyone celebrated, and then one of these magical thinkers said, "Miss Pancella made the rain stop with her story!"
But of course, Miss Pancella did no such thing. Mrs. Pancella did.