Hum, Hum, Humming Along

The past few weeks I've seen an influx of sixth grade customers to Our Happy Little Portable.  This tells me that the honeymoon is over with our youngest kiddos, and they've finally worn their teachers' patience thin.  I've seen the same 5 or 6 sixth graders all year, but the past two weeks saw some new faces.

The funny thing about sixth graders is they're so flipping small compared to most seventh and eighth grade kids, and often look like little angels when they come in.  This past week I had Humming Girl, all brown braids and big eyes behind huge glasses.  This kid looked like she never made a peep and couldn't ever manage to make it out to ISS.  However, even the most angelic child can lose their mind and this one, apparently, cussed out our Mrs. Band Teacher.  (Really?  Like the sweetest lady on earth?)

In any case, as it was nearing the end of the grading period, kids who didn't have a lot of make up work often needed stuff to do.  And thankfully Mrs. Math had given me a link to a great website that had math fact coloring sheets - It's here, if you're interested. In any case, I gave Humming Girl a couple of these to work on - NO CALCULATOR - which just aggravates the hell out of the kids...and she happily sat at the desk next to my desk, solving her math facts and coloring.

And humming.

Humming Christmas Carols.

All. Day. Long.

She was rather quiet about it, so the only people who could hear her were me and a kid or two that were working up at the front table.  One of them, an 8th grade Repeat Customer, looked at her, and looked at me, eyebrows raised.

I nodded my head, letting him know I could hear her too.  "It's okay," I said quietly to him, "she's not hurting anybody."

He nodded and went back to work.

And we listened to Christmas Carols the remainder of the day and it was just kind of nice.