Thursday, May 17, 2007

Way to freak out the little ones:

Remember my little-kids class (the one featured in this post)? Well, today they were learning words beginning with the letter A, including angel, apple, ant and alligator. Now, when I'm back in the US, I live pretty damn close to the Okefenokee Swamp, which is home to a rather astonishingly large number of alligators who just love to be photographed. And I love photographing them. This means that when I get to teach classes about alligators, I have awesome props. The kids were utterly thrilled with my plethora of alligator shots, including this one:

alligator

Then I busted out my finale:

my brother was eaten by an alligator


That's a shot of my brother, with his head in the mouth of a stuffed (dead) alligator. The kids went apeshit. I could tell that they couldn't decide if this was thrilling or terrifying. One girl asked me in grave seriousness: "Teacher brother... angel?"

Meanwhile, when Gwen showed that same photo to her class of the same level, the reaction was to ask if the alligator was computer generated!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's terrific, Jane! Especially the angel comment. When I talked to my Swiss kids about alligators last year they refused to believe that I had swum in rivers, lakes, etc, where the gators live. Granted, when you are swimming and see gators, you leave/move/get out, but they are in these bodies of water.

I have a picture of someone sticking her head in that same alligator's mouth from when we went to the swamp on a 7th grade fieldtrip.

annie said...

I have a photo of myself with that alligator as well :-)

In Russia, many of my students were quite shocked to hear that I would go swimming in a river or lake that might possibly have a alligator. My thought was, "there are rivers and lakes that *don't*?"

Jelly said...

Brother...angel? Too cute!