My kids are so poor that...

Welcome to the first of many posts on how awesome my kids are, given their limited means.

My students are so poor that...

1. Instead of fresh toys, they play with freshly caught bees. At the end of my fifth grade class, one boy had a black ball pinned in his fingers and I asked him what he was playing with. He told me that it was a bee, as he stroked its furry body, he had his hands tightly pinching the bee's wings. He had been holding onto this bee the entire 40 mins of class! When I asked him how he got this bee, he told me - he picked it off a flower! Duh!

When I first saw these flowers, I thought that they looked like baby carrots. If my kids saw a bee on these honey suckles, they'd pick it off and stroke it for fun. 

2. They steal paper from me. I give them little white squares of paper to take quizzes on and everyday, there just never seems to be enough paper. It turns out that perfectly square paper can also be used to send notes and fold paper cranes. I would steal from me too.

3. They play ping-pong on their desk tables during the break. Our school only has two tile ping-pong tables, which teachers and older students can play on. My seventh graders are simply just too low on the ping-pong food chain to even get any play time, so they've created a harder game. Desk pong. The two center tables are connected, and all of my boys crowd in the back of the room as two boys face off on one another for about 8 mins that they have for break.