Stinky noodles

So, last Monday, we started our unit on the five senses and focused on our sense of touch first. I put cooked spaghetti noodles in the sensory table after getting the idea off of a teaching forum. So I spent all Sunday cooking pots and pots of spaghetti noodles and on Monday, the kids went crazy! They loved playing with the noodles and filling buckets with them and seeing how many they could fit in their hands, etc. Now, the website said that you could leave the noodles in the table for up to three days, so I left it overnight, thinking it would be good to go on Tuesday morning.

Tuesday morning, I walk into my room and notice something smells just terrible. I had accidentally left my lunch box at school, so I thought that was the problem. I cleaned out my lunch box and borrowed some air freshener from the custodian and thought the problem solved.

Then, centers time came. I asked my aid to take the top off the sensory table, like I always do. Oh. My. God. The most awful smell in the entire world penetrated the entire room (and the entire hallway, I found out later). The noodles were rotten and disgusting, and of course my kids freaked out! So I had to spend the entire centers time cleaning up the mess with the help of our wonderful, patient custodian. The kids kept running up to the table, screaming, "Teacher, it smells so bad over here!" So, I told them to go stand by the door, or go to a different center. And slowly, they would creep their way back over to continue their investigation only to discover that it still smelled like shit.

My favorite quote from the day was when one student tapped me on the leg while I wiping down the table and said, "Teacher, it smells like someone pooped. Was that you? Because you look too big to poop your pants." Oh, four year olds...

It's proven to be pretty useful in this week's topic, smelling, though. Every day when I ask about something that smells bad, they scream, "NOODLES!" We'll probably be talking about the smelly noodles all year. Which is probably good because on days when I feel like it can't possibly get any worse, I'll be glad that at least my room doesn't smell like rotting fish covered in feces.

Love,

AJ