Choice Time Musical

I had my last volunteer day of the '08-'09 school year on Friday. Normally when I go Star's school, the teacher sets up three activities or assignments--called "have tos". I, the teacher, and the teacher's aid each manage one of these and the kids rotate through at their own pace. The kids who finish their "have-tos" first get to do whatever they want--called "choice time"--while they wait for everyone else to finish.

Friday, my job was to help the kids illustrate a booklet that contained the text to a song about May Day; which I've since come to think of as the most disenfranchised American holiday of them all. Anyway, the kids really latched onto the song and sang along as they illustrated their booklets with flowers, cheery suns, poop, and exploding houses (they are six-year-olds, after all).

As more and more of them entered choice time, I was surprised to see that many of them kept on singing the song. By the time everyone had finished the three have tos, the singing kids had organized themselves into a kind of impromptu chorus line complete with hand puppets. They invited everyone who wasn't going to sing (about half the class) to be their audience. The performance was enthusiastic, the audience went crazy, and as the singers took a bow, I knew that I would remember this as the best day I ever had in Star's classroom.