Teacher Tales

So I was working with a small group of kids yesterday and we were learning the ou sound. I asked the kids to think of words with ou sound and one of my kiddos said - "What about the word summons?" Obviously we haven't master the ou sound yet, but it just struck me so sad that one of my 3rd graders, an 8 yr. old, not only knows the word summons, he knew what it meant.

And, on a lighter note- one of the major 3rd grade skills to be mastered is the ability to sort things. It doesn't matter what or how, just that the student identifies some kind of characteristics and can sort the objects according to their "rule." A few weeks ago, another teacher & I were brainstorming different manipulative sorts that we could come up with and I suggested a sock sort. A few days later the Mrs. Z came in with a huge basket of socks to be sorted & gave her students piles of socks to sort how ever they wanted. Suddenly, a group of girls all were whispering & turning their backs to their pile. Suspicious, Mrs. Z went to find out what was going on and discovered that one of her son's whitey - tighties were on top of the sock pile! You can imagine her relief that they weren't hers! She nonchalantly waded them into a ball & shoved them in her bag & made the neighbor girl in her class promise to not mention it to her son. We third grade teachers seem to have undies issues this year.