Moushkila Nia

"Miss Angie, Miss Angie! Water is falling from up there, down!"

I craned my neck to see if the ceiling was leaking. Nope, no such thing! Turns out, they were trying to tell me that it was raining outside! I was almost as excited as my kindergardeners as we all crowded around the windows to marvel at the darkened patches of the school grounds where the rain had hit. When I walked outside later, it felt really strange; the heat that had been with us, a constant, heavy, immobilizing presence around us since we first arrived 3 weeks ago, was gone. In its place was something milder and refreshing and cool as a cucumber on my skin.

Today was an exhausting and confusing day. Two kids cried as if their were being boiled alive (after being skinned alive that is); there was a missing kid (not one of mine thank god!) who had not shown up to class since day 1, although his parents claimed otherwise; and I was so busy with my kindergardeners that I completely forgot to go upstairs during period 9 to teach my 2nd graders- so that's another 40 minutes lost, and only 2/3 of them understand finally how many bundles of 10 go into 100.

No problem though. Moushkila nia, as they say in Arabic. Tomorrow, I will get the other 1/3 to understand, and then we'll move on to bundles of 100, 1000, and 10,000, and then place values. In my kindergarden class, I taught my kids a version of "100 bottles of beer on the wall" as a way of getting them to practice counting objects. No worries, appropriate substitutions were made! Beer became pencils, and the wall was replaced by a desk, and 100 by a much smaller number, 3.