Setting: My third grade classroom, Payson, Utah. Controlled chaos (only at times).
Time: Writer's Workshop after lunch.
Characters: Drop dead gorgeous teacher (ahem), 28 rugrats (mostly all cute..lol), and the bee that was tormenting the female students.
Topic: Revising a rough draft. In the words of my students..."adding words."
My students are young authors who feel that they can write one draft and be done. Most of them can't write in complete sentences, so you can imagine what their work is like. If you can get kids to learn how to evaluate their own writing through revision, reading about their entire trip to Disneyland is less painful.
I pulled out my latest memoir (a story about a small moment in your life) and was teaching the kids how to revise by reading each sentence and deciding how they could make it better. I happened upon the sentence "Fear swept through my body." I stated that I thought it was a great sentence but I could change the word "body" to a better word. So I started thinking about options.....the kids started shouting out options as well, "veins, bones, insides, mind" etc. My golden student (no really he is, he's got blonde hair, hence the golden, and is amazing) shouted out an unfamiliar word to most other third graders. I nearly died, passed out, expired, what have you. I couldn't laugh or draw any attention to his remark so that other kids (well pretty much the entire class) would hopefully not notice and we could move on. Fighting back tears of laughter I had to leave the room and tell them to get to work.
You are asking, "What was the word?" "What did he say?" I'm only dragging it out for supsense purposes. The funniest thing in the history of blurting out in class was......TESTICLES, TESTICLES, TESTICLES....yep, he shouted it three times. Judging by the look on his face, he wasn't trying to be a rascal and say something inappropriate. It was all complete inosense. I'm pretty sure he didn't know what he was saying. Somebody must be getting the Bird's and the Bee's talk at home bacause that was most certainly NOT a recent spelling word. I'm sure his mother will be mortified when I finally get a hold of her. No parent wants a call concerning their child and the word testicle.
So, here is the sentence (from my memoir about a near death rafting trip) in my student's point of view...... "Fear swept through my Testicles." Sounds more like a man's memoir about his manly, husband abusing wife.
