spring break YAY

Yesterday was our last day and now we are officially on spring break for the next week. Our class has been getting more and more wild as we got towards break which usually happens all over the school and all over the country. Our school is a low income school so usually when it gets close to breaks our kids have a lot of emotions because school is their safe place because at home there is abuse, not enough food, dirty conditions etc that these poor kids have to deal with so behaviors become more severe because kids have a very hard time with expressing their emotions. Our class is no different. My friend “Amy” has been getting moodier and moodier lately. One of her former teachers told me that grandma  treats her like a normal kid. Example Amy wears noise cancelling headphones here at school because she gets overwhelmed easily and shuts down. Like if the teacher has to raise her voice towards another student even with the headphones on she will try to hide I guess is the best way to describe it and will sometimes start to cry. Well grandma wrote to the teacher and claimed that Amy doesn’t want to wear the noise cancelling headphones because she is embarrassed by them but as soon as Amy comes into the room she asking for her headphones so we think it’s grandma that is embarrassed by the headphones which is sad considering she doesn’t seem to understand her granddaughter at all. Amy has also been refusing to do work quite a lot which is in 5th going into 6th grade next year and I don’t want her to fall behind. She will have a 1-on-1 para next year but some paras are strict and others seem to care less about their students so I hope she gets one that at least makes her do her work. Amy is smart and I think sometimes hormones are playing a part in her refusal but she was also not forced to do work last year so I can see why we are having issues now with this. My friend K is back at school and now likes J so those 2 are constantly messing with each other and she will come up to me and say J was touching my shirt or J tapped me and I keep telling her if you don’t like it then you need to ask him to stop but she does her fair share of touching him as well so it’s not exactly one sided but I just keep telling her she needs to speak up if she doesn’t like what he is doing or any other kid because she always runs to me and I’m trying to get her to speak up for herself. She constantly tries to come up to me for things and when she gets a worksheet usually math she immediately asks for help instead of trying to see if she can figure it out first so I tell her to try to see if she can figure it out and give her resources she can use . I explained to the teacher what I was doing when the students were gone for the day so she knew I wasn’t  just not wanting to help her. I’m trying to get her to figure things out for herself before she asks for help or at least try. Our friend J is still doing pretty good. He does get upset when people accuse him of things which sometimes he is guilty of and he does leave the room for a few minutes to take a break but does come back. I has been a bit girl crazy lately and we try to not have the kids worry about bfs and gfs because to me they need to focus on school more than gfs and bfs . He is still argumentative and gets rude and talks constantly still. N has been having more issues with putting his hands on other students over stupid things. For example we have a line order when we leave the classroom and there is a friend that is behind N those 2 argue so much so finally the teacher moved N to the end of the line where we have a new friend Z who he doesn’t get along with either. Yesterday our class was playing silent speed ball and P got out because she didn’t catch the ball but for some reason she was still holding on to the ball N went over and was fighting with her over it trying to get it out of her hands and I told him to keep his hands to himself he stormed out of the room saying how much he hated our class. Take responsibility for what you do which we are trying to teach these kids. N is constantly trying to tell others what to do which makes a lot of them very angry. He’s constantly telling M to stop doing whatever she’s doing but he singles her out a lot. M is getting more and more strange. She laughs at nothing and will purposely come near me making weird noises I just ask her to go sit down. She had her mom call the school and claim that a sub was picking on her all day which it wasn’t the sub it was me and it was because she can’t keep any comment in her head she has to say it out loud and she kept saying negative stuff like i don’t like school, i’m tired so I was like keep it in her head stop saying stuff out loud. We went to lunch and she was the one turned around at the lunch table but she was claiming one of the other students from the other SCCC classes was staring at her and I told her she needed to turn around and face the correct way and she wouldn’t see anyone staring at her. She kept going on about it. When we got back in the room that day she kept talking negative so I told her if she didn’t stop I would send her over to the other SCCC class because she was driving me crazy. Our teacher is going to be out for a week and I’m not sure I’m going to survive a whole week with these kids. I’m going to try my best. So we now have a 3rd SCCC class so the para that was in our room has her own room now. When she was in our room we were pretty close but now that she has her own room we seem to have drifted apart. Like we used to have lunch together but now I barely see her at lunchtime. It is what it is.  For our kids I worked out a deal with a local t-shirt maker to make them end of the year shirts where the other kids can sign their shirts . For 13 shirts it’s only gonna cost me 150 which isn’t too bad. Then I’m going to have them tie dye them too. I also have mood necklaces with their astrological signs on them, bracelets that have a cool message with them, some positive stickers, certificates. I’m hoping they like them. My teacher is figuring out some interesting things about the other teacher I used to work with. My brother is hopefully gonna get to go back to a group home but we aren’t sure when exactly. Other than that not much else exciting going on. Logan is going to be moving back with us for like 6 months til he goes to college. His mom passed away and according to him he has no contact with his dad. I hope that is true. He has been staying with his grandparents since October but according to him they are leaving to go on vacation and don’t want him by himself at their house probably because of his previous mental health issues and they are like renting out their house to other  people while they are gone. So yea nothing else really exciting going on. Just wanted to update on our class. Our new friend Z is something else. She came from our school in gen. ed. One of her first days in our class she pushed K when they were in the bathroom and then tried to push her again when we were going outside for extra recess I got on her. She has messed with P and taken things off her desk. She was sitting next to A and was teaching her inappropriate things to say like so and so I farted and thanks daddy but like sexually not parent. She even tried to talk the way A talks and me and the teacher told Z that she is making fun of her by doing that and she was like no i’m not. I told her that’s something called mocking and it’s not nice to do. Nobody in our class likes her that much. Amy is very possessive of another friend in the other SCCC room and Z also befriended that friend. So Amy really doesn’t like her lol.