Since I began volunteering in Logan’s classroom on Tuesday afternoons, I have been helping the kids in math. At first I thought this was ironic since math has never been my strong suit. It has been going well, however. My hope would be that I could manage math at a first grade level, after all! Thank goodness I have! Phew!

Well, yesterday when I walked into his class, the kids were finishing up a craft of making a construction paper turkey. You see, they were given a baggie full of different sized squares and rectangles that, with scissors and glue stick in hand, were to cut and glue the pieces accordingly. The student teacher in the class, who was leading the activity, was building her’s for the first time as the students were building their’s! Kind of a “fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants” activity, but fun to go around and see how differently the kids put them together given the same set of directions!

As the students placed the last feathers on the rump of their turkey and were in preparations for math, Logan’s teacher approached her student teacher in a kind of desperate plea to please use me to help her instead of sit with the kids and their math lesson. This was funny for me, as I was standing right by these two women who were discussing where they thought my services could best be used- as if I weren’t right there! I ended up following Logan’s teacher into a small work room just behind his classroom where I encountered a small round table covered with sheets of colored paper, scraps of paper and two paper cutters.

With this vision before me, I found myself whisked off in a day dream to last year when I volunteered in Logan’s kindergarten class. There was quite a lot of paper cutting going on and more than one occasion where I would walk out of there with either tears in my eyes or a pounding headache – not because of an abundance of children or anything like that, but because of the way that I had to measure and calculate the paper before cutting it down from say, an 18″-by-12″ sheet of paper into 2-inch strips or 4″-by-5″ squares…then having to determine how many large sheets were necessary to glean 200 of whatever smaller piece I was working on! Oh my! The brain I was blessed with doesn’t happen to thrive under that kind of pressure!

It’s not that I was unwilling to undergo this kind of task for Logan’s teacher yesterday, but for fun I shared with her the traumas of last year and thus, ended up doing the counting after she did the cutting.

This is a sample of the project that we were preparing for.

I caught a glimpse of the instructions for the project. Below are some of the sights that I saw and stacks that I counted and recounted.

I kind of thought this activity wasn’t all bad. Little did I ever realize how much went into the behind-the-scenes of an elementary school classroom! Maybe I can sit in on the day that these pilgrims are made! I think I could dig the putting together part of it!