Ok, I know we’ve all had them….those days when the best lesson plans just aren’t enough to save the day.  I had one of those days with one of my kindergarten classes last week.  We read a great story about monkeys – the kids loved it!  They were jazzed!  They were ready to draw some monkeys!

So they zipped back to their tables, whooping like monkeys (that should have been a clue for me there), wrote their names on their papers and put their markers in the air, the signal that they were all ready to draw along with me.

So we drew.  And we drew some AWESOME monkeys.  The girl monkeys had hair bows and pretty lips.  The boy monkeys wore bow ties and little monkey hats.  We were jamming in the art room.  And then….

I passed out the crayons so they could color their monkeys.  Then I heard it:

Mrs. B., I don’t want to color today!  My hands are tired!  Me too – I don’t want to color either!  I’m done!

So I worked it – hey kids, these are brand new crank-em-up crayons!  All your favorite colors!  I got out the glitter crayons.  Sparkly crayons, who can turn them down?!  Girls, make sparkly pink hair bows!  Boys, your monkey doesn’t have to be boring brown like Mrs. Brouwer’s – it can be sparkly blue!  Nothing.  Nada.  No coloring, not now, not ever.

I was shameless.  I brought out Mo the Art Room Monkey.  He walked around the room with me, telling the kiddos that his new monkey friends needed color.  Mo said he didn’t like scribbling.  Mo said his monkey friends didn’t like Mr. Whitespace either, please fill in all the spaces.  Still nothing.  We were done coloring.

Mo tried his best to help me.

I took a quick peek at the calendar.  Was it a full moon?  Had the children been fed sugar sandwiches for lunch today?  Was it a case of winter cabin fever?  HAD MY SWEET KINDERS BEEN TAKEN OVER BY ALIENS??

So I gave up.  We moved on to painting the background.  Now, my kinders ROCK at painting.  We paint a lot and they love it.  They know all the tricks – how to give their brush a good bath before moving to a new color, how to be careful with our colors so we don’t make mud, how to keep the paper from getting too wet and turning to mush.

We did a review – Yes Mrs. B!  We are just painting the background, not our monkeys!  Yes Mrs. B!  We’ll choose our two favorite colors and just use those, one for the monkey vines and one for the background!  And so….we made mud.  We painted over our half-colored monkeys.  Our papers were sloppy with water and muddy paint.  We made a glorious mess and the monkeys disappeared in the paint.

This is where I began chanting my art teacher mantra – “My kids will leave my art room happy and feeling good about the art they created….”  So I smiled my art teacher “Gee that’s a nice job” smile and we put the soggy masterpieces on the drying rack.  My kindergarten monkey artists cleaned up, lined up, and I was really, really happy to return them to their teacher that day.  I was whipped, wrung out, tired beyond words.  The longest 50 minutes of my life.

And I still had another class to teach…thankfully they had not been taken over by aliens and were ready to work on their project!

And, gulp, I’m going to share some of the monkey business drawings from that strange day.  Be kind, friends, and know that I did my best!

Happy Monkeys!

And, some not so happy monkeys!

And….it WAS a full moon that night!