Bad Words

There is inevitably a time in every educator's life when they will have to address a child using bad language. I have had two such occasions already in my first year…

Before Christmas break, we were "enjoying" yet another indoor recess. My students had really taken off in their writing and were really excited about being able to write in their very own notebooks. I was working in my classroom and our aide brought two boys into my classroom. The first thing that I heard was, "you're not going to call our moms are you?" So I knew that they had done something bad… turns out the boys were writing bad words in their writing notebooks and showing them off to their classmates. The words that they had written were butt and sh-t. Both boys knew that they were in big trouble. We discussed the words and why they were not ok for school. When I emailed their parents, I told them, "the silver lining, if you choose to see it that way, is that the words were spelled correctly-so at least they are learning something!"

Now this week… we were having guided reading in our classroom. There was a group of students working with me and the other kids were working in groups on other tasks. All of the sudden I overheard the word sh-t. I stopped and looked at the group and asked them who did it. They gave her up right away. I sent the girl to the office and told her that I would come talk to her about it. When I got in to the office she insisted that it was not her and that other students had said the bad word. So I went to get the rest of her group to talk it over with them. When they all came into the room one of the girls looked at me and shrugged, "I am just really confused because I don't even know what sh-t means!"

After we had our serious talk about the bad language, I needed a minute before I went back. When I got to the door, one of the kids tattled right away, "(he) already said a bad word!" He came out of the room looking sheepish. I asked him what word he had said and he told me, "the c word." Oh boy. So many dread-filled thoughts filled my mind about kids asking me what that c-word meant or why it was so terrible. With fear I asked him what c-word he said. He looked down in shame and whispered to me, "crap…"
Whew.

The Darndest Things

So many times my little 5 and 6 year old angels shock and surprise me with the things that they think, say, or remember. I have a few that I would like to share.

My little friend R needs a lot of encouragement to do tasks that he is more than capable of. We are working on the "sometimes you gotta do things that you don't wanna do" train of thought. So when he completes a task with minimal prodding, I try to encourage and praise. As I was looking over his paper one day, I told him that I had enjoyed the same part of a story that he had written about. I said, "great minds think alike, huh?" He pats me on the hand and tells me, "good job!"

Another little boy, D, is the youngest of 4 and has a very developed sense of humor. He is one of those kiddos that I can joke with or tease and he just gets it. In our classroom we have an old pickle jar that has been repurposed as a 'word jar.' We have used the jar on occasion, all of the kids know what it is, or so I thought. D picks it up one day and asks me "what is this thing?" I gave him a confused look and told him "that's where I keep fingers of naughty little boys." He looked like he was thinking about it to decide if I was serious or not. He then looked down at his hand and asked me "then why do I still have all of mine?"

Finally, at the beginning of the year I was explaining to my kids what a pen pal was. We have pals that are just on the other side of SD in a town called Belle Fourche. I explained to the kids that it means "beautiful fork" and showed them what a fork in a river or a road was. Well fast forward to now, I have a little one who has quite the advanced vocabulary. We were waiting for her to be picked up one day after school and she was telling another student, "We wrote letters to our pen pals today. They live far away-you know-where the beautiful river forks?"