The Po Show

Third Grade Afternoon

It's National Education Week again, and as always our elementary school invites parents to come into their children's classes to observe a lesson. Today I went to Tessa's class for math time.

I've been in the classroom before, during Open House and then for the Halloween party, but I was struck again how wonderful the spaces in the new school are. Everything is so light and there's so much more space in the rooms. That's a good thing, since there are 23 kids in Tessa's class, which makes it the biggest class in the whole school. Most classes are right around 20 kids, and many have fewer.

Today's lesson dealt with estimating and algorithms as strategies for solving equations. I still haven't quite gotten over the fact that they talk about algorithms in third grade now, but it's just another word to the kids :). After doing some work at the board all together, they broke up into partners and played a game called Go Collecting, similar to Go Fish, that helped them practice estimating. The room got a little loud, naturally, and I didn't feel so great, but it was so nice to see Tessa's teacher in action. She is so kind and very gentle with the kids, but she doesn't let anyone get out of hand.

I wasn't feeling great, as I mentioned, and it was a little iffy as to whether I was going to school today at all. Matthew started feeling really sick last Friday evening, shivering violently and feeling achy and exhausted. Ugh, what else could it be but the flu? Once he started running a 103 fever over the weekend, it was pretty clear we were done for. This was such a bummer, since he and Tessa were scheduled for H1N1 vaccinations tomorrow. I spoke to the receptionist at the ped's today, and she said that if he does have the flu, and it certainly seems like he does since he had all the symptoms, it had to be H1N1 since seasonal flu hasn't started around here yet. Then of course yesterday I started feeling badly, and I tried to convince myself that I just had a sinus headache because of the high pressure system that had come in.

Today it was clear that I was too far down the path of flu to turn back. But I really wanted to go to Tessa's class, and I wasn't running a fever yet (though I am now), and Matthew was feeling much better in the early afternoon, so I got to go. It was all worth it, to see Tessa coming down the hallway, jumping up and down in line when she saw me.