Intrigued?  Well of course you are!  This is the result of some creativity from my 5th graders this morning.  It was actually unintentional as the original idea was Fluffy Unicorns.  You read that right – Fluffy Unicorns. I told the kids last week that we needed a topic for lyrics to go with the chords we were learning to play.  The majority of the class latched onto “Fluffy Unicorns” for some reason, with a few kids listing topics like Star Wars and Cats.  So, my intention was to have them vote on these top three and to get going on the project.

To save time, I just wrote the words down in this order on the board:

Fluffy

Star

Cats

Not thinking at all about how the kids would look at it of course.  Until I started hearing the giggling and the whispering – “Fluffy Star Cats!”.  Well, we voted and you guessed it, the topic became Fluffy Star Cats.  Our next job was to create sentences about these creatures to each fit within eight beats – think blues progression here in terms of chords. The conversations were lively and animated with lots of laughter.  I only gave them a couple of minutes and they came up with some doozies.  “A bunch of fluffy star cats, outside my bedroom door”,  and “I’m a super fluffy star cat, meow, meow, yeah”, just to name a couple.  Then we put them in some kind of order and began singing them in sequence.

Now, before you think this is all about my great, flexible teaching ability, I want you to know it is not.  You see, the point of the story is this.  The fact that we could be flexible and have some fun affected one of my new students in class.  He just moved in from out of state and I had yet to see this kid smile.  I couldn’t decide if he thought he was too cool to smile, or if he was really unhappy or angry, or really quiet and shy.  After doing a little digging, I found out he’s just a quiet kid, but moving in as a 5th grader is tough and I don’t think he was very happy.  The other kids in that class are a pretty rowdy bunch and I could see where someone who’s quiet would feel overwhelmed by them.  But for the last several weeks, my goal had been to do SOMETHING to make this kid smile.

You see, I was that kid.  I think I’ve mentioned that I went to 6 different elementary schools, one for kindergarten, one for 1st and 2nd grade, two different schools for 3rd, thankfully staying at the second one for 4th and 5th and then two for 6th grade.  Man, is it rough to be the shy kid always being the new kid.  Or maybe I was shy because I was always the new kid.  So, I try to make it a point to help our new kids feel as welcome as I possibly can and build some kind of relationship with them.  But this kid had been a tough nut to crack.  Until this morning.

Somewhere in the middle of the organized chaos, a smile popped up on his face.  Then I saw him start to laugh.  He actually participated a little at the end of the class.  As fun as the class was today, the one thing that made my day was seeing this kid maybe finally break through that barrier of being the “new kid”.

I have another new kid in first grade who is a tough nut to crack because she’s had such a tough life.  Her behavior makes it difficult to like her, quite frankly, even knowing what she’s been through.  Firm but kind is my motto, but sometimes I’m feeling more firm than kind I’m afraid.  So today, she’s playing with her shoelaces and doing nothing else.  Her very, very, long pink shoelaces that she plays with, tying and untying, over and over.  I’ve tied them for her again and again, double tying them and the next time I look over, there she goes again.  So today as the kids were singing and I was walking around listening, I walked behind her.  And something happened.  This child looked up at me and her eyes were almost begging me.  “Please like me!”.  I don’t know if I’ve every experienced something that intense before.  And I just reached down and gave her a big squeezy hug and smiled at her.  Still playing with those shoestrings, but now smiling back.

It’s easy to feel for those kids who suffer in silence and behave well, but it’s hard to feel bad for those kids who are also suffering but who demonstrate it in a more inappropriate way.  Maybe we, or should I say “I” need to spend less time listening to the noise and focusing on the eyes.  They say the eyes are the windows to the soul.  Maybe if I did a little more soul searching I might find a new kind of empathy for those more difficult kids.  Again, finding something to learn from today and working on making my little corner of the world a little better.