Girl Teacher?

This week the kindergartners have been learning about forces, pushing and pulling, in science.

The experiment today was to loop a rope through a gift bag filled with small items, then loop that rope around the back of two chairs facing away from each other creating a pulley system.

Students had to experiment by pushing the rope away, and pulling the rope towards them. The goal was to see which is faster.

It's kind of interesting since I wasn't exactly sure what the outcome would be. Intially I thought pulling might be faster, but then isn't the power pretty much the same, so could they just be the same?

I didn't account for three things:

1. The backs of the chairs didn't have a gap to string rope through
2. Our rope was three karate belts tied together, the knots kept getting stuck
3. Some students didn't know how to push the rope away, so the push took longer because I had to stop them from pulling

One student had a birthday party today since his mom had purchased a large cake to share with his class. Basically every student noticed and ask why they didn't get a cake on their birthday.

I heard one student, in the first time English speaker class, had been speaking to his mom about our school. She wanted to get a feel for how he was doing. She asked him if he was having fun and he said he liked Niki Teacher's class the best! Yay!

Then mom asked if Niki Teacher was a girl teacher or a boy teacher. Fair question, Niki is a pretty gender neutral name. Apparently he responded with "I don't know." I actually thought it was kind of funny.

One of the kindergartners asked me a couple months ago if I was a girl. It sounded kind of mean the way she asked but when I said yes she smiled and said quietly "me too." It was like it was a secret or something -I guess it is to some of them.