J is for "Just not good enough" I guess.

Oh boy. Did preschool today ever feel like a failure. I thought I had fun things planned, but boy it didn't work out quite like I had envisioned.  Two of the four kids were pretty resistant and kept wandering off and not wanting to participate. I think every child was put into a time out at least once. There were only a few moments of redeeming goodness of the whole 2 hours.

I opened with the Surprise Pumpkin story. It went well enough. The aforementioned resistant kids kept pounding the table, not listening, but the other two seemed to like it.

J is for Jack-o-lantern.

• I had a paper pumpkin for each child to turn into a Jock-o-lantern. I had a big bucket of shape punches I let the kids use to make different shapes for the eyes and nose and I cut crescents for the mouths. Two of the kids could figure out the punches, but two couldn't. I should have just stuck to the original shape pumpkin idea where I provided basic shapes (triangles, rectangles, crescents, and squares). All the pumpkins turned out cute, but the punches were the downfall on this one.

J is for Jump and Jog

• I had lots of J's taped to my kitchen floor that they were supposed to jump from one to the next in a circle. They didn't even all make it around once before the papers all started ripping to shreds. Guess I needed cardstock.
• I tried to play red light-green light while they jogged outside. Once again, two refused to play and just went to the playset. The other two had fun. Only problem with this is that once I let them have a turn being the lights, they'd tackle the child with the lights once they reached them. That lead to punching and a time out. Oi.

 J is for Jerry (of Tom and Jerry because I needed some time to regroup since I felt like that whole first hour was a failure) They watched a Halloween episode of Tom and Jerry and it was fun to listen to their commentary the whole time..

J is for Juice and Jam

• I had a plate of fruits and veggies to juice, and electric juicer, and a hand juicer.  3 of them liked the idea of juicing, but only Dean drank his juice (and Walter drank the undrunk juice when he woke up). The others said it was yucky. When I asked one what it tasted like, he said, "strawberries and apples". And that's yucky? Whatever.One just ate her fruits and had no desire to juice. I had cut the oranges in half so they could juice them in the hand juicer and she kept trying to eat it, biting into the rind and all.
• I made toast and put jam on it. Most of the kids liked that, but one had a fit about jam being on his toast. I think he eventually ate it.

5 Little Speckled Frogs Jump

• They stood on my coffee table for the log and jumped onto the carpet while I sang this. They couldn't grasp the notion to only have 1 child jump into the "pool" so we could count down the frogs. But whatever. They kind of liked being allowed to jump off of furniture.

J is for Jobs

• I was really excited to try and role play different types of jobs, but once again, only two of the kids wanted to (when it was time to role play, that is--when they were supposed to be doing other projects with me, they kept putting on the fire hat and hard hat and running around). Dean has a jobs book that he LOVES, but the other kids weren't interested in any of the jobs except fireman.  We pretended to be firemen, sprayed a fire and rescued a cat. We also pretended to be doctors and patients, taking temperatures and weighing each kid. This went ok. Just not what I was hoping for. Theme of the day.

At one point, one of the kids threw the fireman hat like a frisbee and it cut the nose of one of the other kids. That poor same kid walked right into the chain of someone swinging when we were outside waiting for parents. He also got conked by the trapeze bar. Poor guy. It was a tough, but we made it through it. I just hope I can redeem my teaching next month! Q & R coming the first of next month.