Did you hear the story...?

This week I am working with a substitute teacher for my main site class.  She had taught at this school before, and is quite familiar with my cooperating teacher's ways, if not classroom routine.  Nevertheless, we worked together, bit by bit, as the class was squirrel-ly and its usual loudness.

By the end of the day, I was completely through with the noise.  Even though I held my temper, I had seen, from different students' coping actions, that THEY were just as stressed out and fed up as the teachers.  Even as they're classmates and friends, talking straight through a lesson, it gets on their nerves too.  They really don't stop to listen...because they don't know how.

One thing I would like to do tomorrow, with the substitute's permission, is to skip the morning handwriting practice and have a town-meeting.  I had spent the day warning kids that they would "practice being quiet with me during recess" (for one minute) because they wouldn't be quiet during the lesson.  I don't like being a policewoman all day, and I know it wasn't building relationship with students, either.

The kids have been learning story elements: Setting, Characters, Problems, Solutions.

How would I phrase it?

(Yesterday, it seemed that we were really tired and stressed because it was very loud.  Does anyone feel that way? Could we try to find a better solution, like the characters in our stories?)

"Second grade, you know, sometimes I feel like we're in a story.  What is our setting?" *(motions around the room. If no student pipes up, I'll tell them: Classroom)*  "Who are the characters? ...and I should see every hand up!

"And the kid characters are trying to make a good classroom.  What do kid characters have in a good classroom?" (listing...friends, manners, things to write with, kindness, attention, listening, fun, taking turns).  "How would characters feel when we don't have that in class?" (sad, frustrated (for the articulate 2nd graders), bored, mad).

(If there are answers, I'll write it on the big writing pad. Then I address the most pressing:

But you know what? Our story seems to have a problem.  Can we think of some problems in our story? WITHOUT naming names. You can say 'some characters'..." 

Sometimes, so many characters get so noisy, that other characters don't feel happy being here.  And you know when it gets noisiest? When the teacher characters are talking.  When some characters start asking for help. 

The teacher characters have tried some solutions.  Do you remember what they were? (Some kids might say, but if they don't, I'll remind them). "The teacher characters have asked kid characters to settle down.  Does it work?...Not all the time.  If it gets too noisy, some kid characters stay in for recess, for a minute.  Those are some solutions.


"But you know what?  Yesterday, those were old characters in the story.   I think w,e the kid characters can make some solutions .  (hopefully they do, otherwise, I'm just taking the reins):

Now...what solutions can our characters do?" This is where it is SO tricky.  I'm trusting students to think before they answer me, to stay on topic, to play and yet not go off track.  This is the moment when the baton gets passed. Crickets singing.  Noses being picked.  More side conversation.

I doubt I can actually cover all this in a 20 minute session.  But I'm going to try SOMETHING, because I refuse to be just a 'cop'.  For my own sanity and THEIRS, we got to do something.