Cloud Nine

Today I think I may have discovered the key to my kids' hearts...music.  From the second they saw my guitar sitting in the corner of the room, they were hooked.  I had planned to teach them a worship song in English as part of our Bible lesson...we ended up singing for over an hour and never did get to today's reading lesson.  I copied out the lyrics to Phil Wickham's song "Cannons"  and gave them copies.  First, we read through the lyrics and I explained some concepts and vocabulary that they didn't know, and then I sang through it once so that they could hear how it goes.  I couldn't help but laugh when Sara said to me, with this huge look of awe on her face, "Miss Ward, you sing just like a real live High School Musical!" Coming from a third grade girl, I'm pretty sure that was a compliment.  In any case, they caught on quickly and were begging me to keep singing.  

     Just before lunch, I gave them some free time to read or draw while I listened to each kid recite this week's Bible verse.  Diego came back to my desk and said, "Miss Ward, can I practice our new song?"  I said yes and then he said, "And can I sit in the back...the girls are distracting me."  I said yes to that too and he sat down with his back against the closet at the back of our classroom.  He studied the words for a few minutes, and then I heard him start humming quietly.  A few minutes later, he was singing right out loud.  In my head, I was jumping up and down, thinking, "I have a student who wants to use his only free time of the day to sing worship songs!"  Then it got better.  After listening to a few more Bible verses, I looked over to see that three other boys had joined Diego, and were all sitting on the floor at the back of our room, singing, "You are holy, great and mighty; the moon and the stars declare who You are!" I would have been excited to see that kind of love for worship music from any of my kids, but I was particularly ecstatic about these boys' excitement because they are the very students that I struggle to keep engaged during school.  As a teacher, finding something that these boys got excited about was a victory in and of itself; as a teacher whose highest priority is for her students to love Christ, seeing these boys get excited about worship music put me on cloud nine.  

                                      
     To top it all off, they even asked if they could take the music with them to lunch, and were singing while they ate lunch.  Sara (above) bumped into a thing or two while trying to walk, read the lyrics, and sing at the same time.  These are the little things that make every day here worth it to me.