Chaotic

The three-year-olds that are my Friday-evening class are adorable. However... the craziness. It is... crazy.

As I sing the opening bars of the "hello song" which is too incredibly inane to even record here, they stick out their tongues and start spluttering at me. And cosi' via. You can tell they're delighted in their naughtiness. It's killingly cute, but not ideal from a discipline standpoint.

Ten minutes later, I am seated on the pedana (bench-y thing) with them (this is to provide maximum access for holding them in place) reading a story. One little girl is listening attentively. Another is attempting to distract her by rattling a metallic box and its contents under her nose. The third little girl is sorting the crayons into different bins according to color (which is a marked improvement on last week, when she kept herself busy by systematically snapping them in half), and the two boys are alternately sitting down to rip pages out of a book and crying "facciamo un giro!" before running a few laps around the room.

This somehow results in one little boy's nose being pushed against the wall. I try to comfort him while two of the others amuse themselves by turning the heaters on and off (by twisting a dial - a trick I inadvertently taught them a few weeks ago when using the heaters to demonstrate the concept of wind; I now know better). "He's fine," his mother reassures me, sticking her head in (presumably as a result of that crazy mother-radar/sixth sense) and glancing around. I see the room through her eyes for a moment: mass chaos. But at least no one is bleeding.

This thought comforts me for the next portion of the lesson, during which we make a collage of cut-out pictures of petals and leaves. I try in vain to get one of the two shy girls to repeat "leaf, please!" while a mother pokes her head in to check on them. I can't decide whether the expression on her face is one of skepticism or pity. Or perhaps she's just trying to figure out why the third little girl (who is the tiniest bit matta, in my opinion) is assiduously trying to ram a crayon into the center of a glue stick. She raises her eyebrows briefly before retreating into the relative safety of the hallway. I can almost hear her thinking "seems a bit strange, but the brochure does say 'highly trained and very experienced madrelinguiste'".

"Leaf, please!" chorus the two little boys as soon as the door has closed and all witnesses are safely out of earshot. I repress a sigh. "Good job!" I enthuse instead.

By the end of the lesson, two of the little girls have fashioned a bed out of some lengths of cloth and a few cushions we keep in the room, and the little boys have climbed into a basket and are pretending it's a train. The other little girl is spreading glue down the front of her dress.

It takes me ten minutes to drag them away from their various forms of amusement - none of which are related to the original theme (flowers) - and eject them from the classroom. In the process, one little boy manages to clock the other in the eye with a puzzle piece, scratching his eyelid.

So someone is bleeding after all.