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"When I woke up this morning I was SO angry that it wasn’t Christmas today." "When I woke up I was SO tired that it wasn’t Christmas I wanted to just stay home." "I’m going to my Grandma’s tomorrow for Christmas." (it turned out, “tomorrow” was quite a few days away). Me: It’s hard to wait for something "Yeah, like you just wait and wait and it still doesn’t happen." Me: What do you do when you are waiting? "Oh, I just do stuff." "I’m just SO SO angry of waiting." "I’m so tired of waiting. I want Christmas now." "But you have to be good waiting. You have to be nice, not naughty." This was the discussion we had on Monday, 7 days before Christmas. Children came into preschool that morning very… well, let’s just say it was a difficult morning. I know this can be a hard time of year for children. We like to think of it as magical, and it definitely is. But it is also full of anticipation, expectations, disrupted schedules, busy parents, etc. I wanted to hear from the children what was going on. Waiting. Waiting is hard. Waiting is especially hard at Christmas when along with the waiting are expectations to be “good” so that Santa will come. And so, we counted the days until Christmas and counted how many of those days would be school days. Me: We are going to be in school together for 5 days, waiting. Will it help if we wait together? Can we help each other wait? "Yes, like we can do stuff together." "If we wait together then we are playing and waiting at the same time." "We can paint and make stuff to wait. We can make Christmas paintings so when we don’t want to wait we just look at the painting and pretend it’s Christmas." "Oh, we can play family and pretend it’s Christmas now! I’ll give out the presents." "If L is angry to wait, we can give her a smile and she will feel better." The rest of the week went much better. We played, created, and sang together. We gave each other smiles and hugs when the waiting got hard. On Friday we toasted our waiting success with hot cocoa. We hung in there together –a community of waiters.
1 Comment
Erin Klitgaard
12/29/2017 09:41:31 pm
I love this post!
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Tricia Windschitl
5 day teacher |