Running of the Preschoolers

Forty days and forty nights has never seemed like quite such a torturous sentence until now. It has rained non-stop for most of this week which means that at school we have been inside almost all week. Three year olds are not generally happy with the notion of being confined, especially when there is an attractive playground visible from the classroom windows that beckons to them regardless of the sheets of rain pelting the windows relentlessly. So after days of entertaining them with other options - extra play time, bubbles, balls, and I can only imagine what the substitutes used yesterday (that was not covered in my lesson plans)- I finally relented to riding our tricycles in the hallway. This seems harmless as the hallway is a giant circle with only two points of escape (one door to the outside and one entrance point to the main hallway) but there are several classrooms along the hallway that are not selfcontained classrooms for children with special needs. And three year olds riding tricycles do not understand the concept of an indoor voice. Trust me on that one. We can keep our indoor voices up until the point that our feet hit the pedals and then it explodes no matter how hard we try. Also, our ability to steer is not fully developed and so we might occasionally ride into a classroom door or wall at full speed. I am quite sure that the other teachers just love me! It is a redeeming quality that we are rather cute and it is hard to resist a three year old on a tricycle laughing and waving (as they just miss the wall). So today we braved the tricycles and I am forever thankful there was no video camera available. The running of the preschoolers is not a moment of a teacher's life that she wants recorded for the world to see, especially when it involves dodging ankle crashes and rescuing wall smashers while pushing a rider in training on an adapted tricycle at full speed. Oh the glamour would be overwhelming and cause such weeping by jealous supermodels that it simply must remain a secret forever! It is fun, but there is no way to look anything but rediculous while dodging tricycles, rescuing stranded children who are flailing with no success trying to escape the clutches of a wall, and running circles around a hallway pushing a tricycle that looks like it could double as a torture device. But we had a good 20 minutes of fun, we worked on motor goals, and I got a free workout! Bonus points for that! I felt slightly like a NASCAR driver though only making left turns - next time we go right around the hall so I can unwind myself! And I need to invest in steel toed, high ankle boots... or learn to run faster.