April Fool's Day in Kindergarten

It's April Fool's Day.

Today is one of two days that all educators across the country dread. The first being the day after Halloween when kids are recovering from a sugar-induced coma and are worthless to instruct. The second being today. If either holiday lands on a Saturday or a Sunday (better yet, Fall break) I find this similar to a "bonus" that other employed individuals get. I'm almost 100% positive that other teachers share my feelings on this one.

The day started off pretty much like I thought.

"Mrs. Broeker, I have a joke for you. Your eyes are blue." Which they aren't, but that is almost too much to bear for a 5 year old joke teller.

"There's a bug on your shirt." (This one is a classic, so it's repeated about two dozen times.)

"Your shoe's untied." (Probably their second favorite)

Or my personal favorite that I haven't heard until this year...

"Mrs. Broeker, are you wearing any underwear?" (snicker, snicker)

I really try my best to play along for about the first hour. I say things like, "Oh, you got me!" "What do you know...It's April Fool's Day?" or "You've got to be kidding!"

I also got a "Mrs. Broeker, I think I'm going to throw up!" Lucky for me, I took her seriously and I found out by mid-afternoon that she wasn't kidding. Lucky for the custodian, she had a really good aim for the trash can.

I met my quota of April Fool's jokes at about 10:30 and I responded with this statement..."Yes, I know it's April Fool's Day, but you need to get busy or we won't have time for recess." That seemed to do the job since we had a beautiful, 80+ degree day.

Last night, I started to think about how April Fool's Day was going to feel like a longer than any normal day. Listening to jokes by Kindergartner students can be draining to say the least. So, I decided that this year I deserved to get those little pranksters back. I came up with a clever, entertaining, yet appropriate game plan with kindergartners in mind.

Every day I serve a snack to my kids right after Specials (P.E., Computer, Art, Science or Music) at about 2:45. The snack is something small like animal crackers, Cheese-Its or Vanilla Wafers (whatever parents decide to donate). When kids don't get their daily snack they feel slighted. Rarely does this happen because they can forget a backpack at home day after day, but snack never! Snack is truly a fourth meal for five year olds or so it seems.

I thought it would be so funny to purchase raw broccoli and break off pieces and tell them that we are now going to have a healthy snack like this one on a daily basis. No more crackers, cookies or trail mix. Raw vegetables from this point forward!

So, that's exactly what I did. We have a small refrigerator to store the broccoli in our kindergarten-wing, which helped with the plan. I then retrieved the broccoli right before picking the kids up from Specials.

I instructed my "helper of the day" to dish out the hand sanitizer while I gave my healthy eating speech. To my surprise, I got nothing but silence. Carefully, I then pulled out the broccoli and heard a few moans, but they were quickly overpowered by Hoorays!! What? I could not believe my ears! I would say that about 2/3rds of my class were excited to okay with the thought of eating cold, raw broccoli for snack. One student was a bit disappointed that I didn't make some accommodations by bring the Ranch dressing. Silly me!

Happy for me, there were five children who were thoroughly disgusted by the thought.

One of them being "Miss L" whose mother gave me permission to use her photo on my blog. At least she lived up to my April Fool's expectations!

You'd think with those rabbit ears she was wearing, that eating broccoli would naturally be her thing?!

It's safe to say that the Kindergartners got the last laugh. The joke's on me.

Happy April Fool's Day!

I'll try harder next year.