Insights from Craft Day

Although craft day itself was very popular and successful with students, it was also a valuable learning experience for me upon reflection.

First of all, cleaning the floors. My CT and I made sure that the students spent at least the last five minutes or so cleaning the floors. With five stations of crafts going on at the same time, things are going to hit the floor, it's inevitable. However, my CT and I didn't want our janitor to come in the room and think, "Oh man, they did crafts today!" Instead we told the challenged the children to clean the floor so well that our janitor wouldn't even know we had crafts that day. And it worked! Our students did a great job cleaning the floors and it looked like any other day in our room.

Though we were slightly unsure if our floors were to a good standard of cleanliness, we visited the other classrooms and found a completely different scene. Upon reflection, I realized that I would be incredibly embarassed to be a classroom teacher and have the janitor dread coming into my room because of the mess he or she would encounter. It also would make me not want to do those fun arts and crafts projects with students because of the mess that they have to deal with. It is not their job to follow behind students and clean up the disaster trail of messiness that they leave behind them. Their job is to maintain the cleanliness of the school and it takes only a few extra minutes out of our day to help those people have an easier job, which is worth it.

The second realization is liquid glue. Wow. I wasn't even thinking that students wouldn't have an idea of how to use liquid glue, but they sure don't. While at the picture ornament station, I saw 5 groups of students come through and use glue. I would say only about one-third of them actually knew how to use glue. The others, after hearing my instructions to use a little bit of glue over the background of the ornament, proceeded to hold the glue bottle upside down over their paper and squeeze the bottle with every ounce of strength they have in their little bodies. I am not sure if they thought that "a little bit of glue" was code for "a lake of glue that your paper could swim in" or what, but goodness. I was never a fan of glue sticks, but now I understand why we use them. If we didn't one day someone would come into our classroom and be swept away by the river of glue coming from our room!