Magical Moments

Children and recreation, group of happy multiethnic school kids playing tug-of-war with rope in city park. Summer camp fun

Life needs to have some fun in it! Fun plays a key role in making school enjoyable and exciting. We work for and strive for those magical moments in the classroom. Sometimes we plan them and carefully execute an exciting lesson or day for our students. And sometimes you can’t necessarily plan to have a magical moment,…they just happen and you have to be open to them. School becomes a place where students love to be! The fun that comes from these moments gives them a bright outlook on learning and working hard.

One year in kindergarten, we decided to surprise the students and turn our regular play house into a pizza restaurant. We bought play food like pizza and cups and plates, created menus and had aprons for cooks. On the day of the big reveal, the students were beyond surprised and so excited! We spent the whole day doing pizza related activities like making fraction pizza, cooking our own individual pizzas and of course playing in the new restaurant. This fun and magical day will surely be remembered fondly by all who experienced it.

Some of the magic can be about just one student. That is okay too because kids have different needs and some need more than others. One year I had a girl who was always singing in class. She had big plans to become a professional singer when she grew up. So we arranged with the music teacher to make a class CD of holiday songs to give to their families as a gift that year. We spent hours in the recording studio and produced an amazing CD filled with these sweet voices. The girl was so happy throughout this process. She helped arrange musical instruments and was so kind as she encouraged others to sing from their hearts. It was a magical time for all of us.

One of the unplanned, magical moments that happened in my fifth grade classroom involved an author, a performance and a cash prize! One year we were all preparing for a visit from a famous author, Eric Kimmel, who wrote the Anansi series and other great books. All the teachers were reading his books to the classes. My class was asked to take the book Anansi and the Moss Covered Rock and turn it into a play to be performed for the rest of the classes in school. We made it a mock trial version or a courtroom drama to tell the story. We worked hard on the script, put it into a play form and went around the school performing for other classes. It took hours out of our regular school schedule. But the kids really enjoyed performing. The day Eric Kimmel came turned out to be very exciting because the entire school knew of his work and all the great books. He was invited into our classroom to watch our courtroom drama version of his book. We had a special chair for him and the room seemed to be buzzing with excitement. The kids were so happy to perform for him and he laughed during the whole play! We took a class picture with him and just loved and enjoyed the magical day! The magic didn’t end there,…a few weeks later we received a card from him, asking for the rights to our courtroom drama and a check for $200 to buy the idea from us. He explained that he loved our version and wanted to add it to his Anansi collection by writing a book based on our performance. You can imagine how excited the kids were! We had so much fun deciding as a class what to do with the $200! We had a class meeting to discuss our options. Some of the suggestions were to buy $200 worth of hamsters for our class pets, a huge pizza party, and on and on! We ended up leaving a legacy at the school by creating a school flag dedicated in our names. We also had enough money to have that big pizza party celebration and buy some books for each student to take home to start their own library. It was a magical time in the room!

When you are a teacher, you love your students. You want to see them succeed and reach their full potential. But most importantly, you want to see your students smile and be happy and feel loved. As we strive to create exciting and fun learning environments for our students, school becomes a happy place – a place of laughter and friendship as we bond through these wonderful moments of magic.