Y’all remember when those last few days of the school year were filled with all-consuming thoughts of screaming your head off on roller coasters at Six Flags, running through the sprinkler in the middle of a steaming summer day, or acting all couch potato while watching Coming to America or reruns of Family Ties? Great times, weren’t they? Well, I get to live in that bubble of excitement every year with my cutie patootie students, although now Family Ties is replaced with crap shows like Spongebob Squarepants and Hannah Montana, but you get the drift. Nonetheless, the energy (and impatience) is palpable, but it’s always a bittersweet time for me as their teacher.
In my 7 years I have taught over 140 students. (Only about 500 more to go.) On average I spend about 35 hours a week with my students every school year. That is a lot of time to get to know personalities, strengths, struggles, and the natures of 20 little beings. They are an extension of my family, and yet I must say goodbye and release them from my bubble every June.
In the past couple of years I’ve tried to do a going away theme for my class. Last year I was moving from Okinawa to the states so I had to leave my class prematurely in April. I had the Dr. Suess theme of “Oh, the Places You’ll Go,” which was a lot of fun. This year I’ve decided (at the very last millisecond, btw) to do a theme centered around the book, Matilda, by Roald Dahl. If you don’t know who Roald Dahl is then I question your literacy skills and if you actually completed elementary school.
If you are a teacher you know that Roald Dahl’s books are the absolute best to read aloud. Dahl has a magnetism in his writing specifically created for child ears. His books are chock-full of enriched vocabulary and ooze with good voice. Unlike some children’s books today (*cough* *Junie B. Jones* *cough*) that lack depth and use improper grammar, Dahl’s books are rich with child-like fantasy and full, round characters. Well, this year my students lapped this book up like water. They could not wait for when I turned off the lights, plopped myself down on the carpet and cracked that book open. So this year I’ve decided to use one of the quotes from the book as the theme for our end of the year celebration.
In a nutshell, 5 year old Matilda is a humble child-genius. She reads Dickens and computes numbers faster than a calculator. She’s clever and in the end uses that cleverness to outsmart the horrible Ms. Trunchbull. Well, somewhere in the middle she is explaining to a pupil how to get back at the evil headmistress when she says,
2 Comments
Matilda was one of my favorite books ever, along with BFG and Witches 🙂 Your kids sure are lucky!
Sarah Allen
(my creative writing blog)
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