We finished our animal reports weeks ago, but I just finally re-found my scribbled page of notes. While the students presented, I was sitting in the back of the classroom, frantically recording on two different sheets. The top sheet was always the evaluation; the bottom, the things too funny or interesting to risk forgetting. Ended up with a full page in the second category.
One more quotable from the panda girl:
"Pandas have 84-240 germs when they are born." Germs, grams. How different could they be?
We have great community in our class, even if we're misinformed:
"Penguins mate for life..." Blair stopped in the middle of reading her display board. She looked up at the class and calmly asserted, "but that's not true."
"How do you know?" I responded.
"We looked it up."
My skepticism must have showed on my face, because Jeffery rushed to her defense. "It's true, Ms. Djerf! I saw it in a commercial!"
A few beavers have it figured out:
Taylor told us all about beavers. The class -highly sensitive to anything remotely inappropriate- was particularly excited about question time during his presentation because they could say the word "dam" over and over again. What I liked the best, however, was the part on their habitat. It read "Some beavers live in the frozen north. Others live in northern Florida."
"Stump the Presenter" is a game we play without even trying:
"How many eggs do lions have in one year?" Poor Emma. She'd learned a lot about lions, but she was a little thrown off by this question, and it took her a minute to respond that lions don't lay eggs. "I know, but how many?" the questioner replied. (We're not the world's greatest listeners.)
If you're threatened by someone else's superlative, simply respond with unrelated but competitive information:
Martha told us that cheetahs are the fastest land animal.
Jeffrey's immediate response: "Yeah, but they can't swim."
And yes, Ms. D. was paying attention while laughing. She even learned three new facts. And she's pretty sure they're legit:
A group of cheetahs is called a coalition. (Bet you didn't know that.)
A tiger's eyesight is six times better than a human's.
A lion's roar can be heard from five miles away. (How do they figure things like that out, anyhow?)
Hmm. I wonder how far away you can hear a class of first and second graders?
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