Who would ever have thought that green paper triangles could cause a war between friends. Five year olds, that's who!
Yesterday as part of my art project the children were asked to cut small triangles out of a piece of green painted paper to make grass. In the subtly manipulative way that only teachers of very young children can get away with, I made a game out of putting their green triangle cuttings into the recycling box. I told the children that when they were done cutting they were to collect and count all of their green triangles and then, to add a bit more fun, they could write their name on the white board along with the number of triangles they'd cut. Yippee! Great fun for five year olds!
My cunning plan was going along magnificently! The first diligent young man cut his triangles, gathered them all up, counted 10, put them in the bin, and happily wrote his name and '10' on the board. Mission accomplished! What a brilliant plan to keep the room tidy as we went! And so the activity continued. A couple of the children wrote 1000 or 200, whether extremely competent cutters or horrible at counting, we'll never know, but they happily did as they were instructed. Everything was going great... until.....
I heard a noise behind me and turned to see two little boys, who until this moment in time were the best of friends, engaged in mortal combat! Tommy (names changed to protect the innocent) had Bobby in a headlock and Bobby was crying for help! Yikes! Green triangle party goes wrong! After a quick shout Tommy released a shaken and somewhat scarred Bobby. He had a few red welts on his face from the encounter! How do you explain that to mom after school?! "Um, yah, the boys were fighting over small green triangles!" lol. Something to remember for their 21st!
Anyway the story finally came out that Bobby had in fact taken some of Tommy's little green triangles to up his count and Tommy wasn't going to take that without a fight! Today they're back to being best of friends!
Yesterday as part of my art project the children were asked to cut small triangles out of a piece of green painted paper to make grass. In the subtly manipulative way that only teachers of very young children can get away with, I made a game out of putting their green triangle cuttings into the recycling box. I told the children that when they were done cutting they were to collect and count all of their green triangles and then, to add a bit more fun, they could write their name on the white board along with the number of triangles they'd cut. Yippee! Great fun for five year olds!
My cunning plan was going along magnificently! The first diligent young man cut his triangles, gathered them all up, counted 10, put them in the bin, and happily wrote his name and '10' on the board. Mission accomplished! What a brilliant plan to keep the room tidy as we went! And so the activity continued. A couple of the children wrote 1000 or 200, whether extremely competent cutters or horrible at counting, we'll never know, but they happily did as they were instructed. Everything was going great... until.....
I heard a noise behind me and turned to see two little boys, who until this moment in time were the best of friends, engaged in mortal combat! Tommy (names changed to protect the innocent) had Bobby in a headlock and Bobby was crying for help! Yikes! Green triangle party goes wrong! After a quick shout Tommy released a shaken and somewhat scarred Bobby. He had a few red welts on his face from the encounter! How do you explain that to mom after school?! "Um, yah, the boys were fighting over small green triangles!" lol. Something to remember for their 21st!
Anyway the story finally came out that Bobby had in fact taken some of Tommy's little green triangles to up his count and Tommy wasn't going to take that without a fight! Today they're back to being best of friends!
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