Here We Go Again

Today was the first day back teaching at the pre-school. 30 children, from age three to almost six. All together, in one class, for two hours. I went with high hopes, as I always do. I want to expect the best from them, and they always reward me by being amazing.
Today, I have to say, I was too ambitious. It was a good lesson for me. When you have 30 children in that age group, with only one teacher to help, arts and crafts any more complicated than colouring in two objects gets out of hand very quickly.

WHAT I DID:
I used the We Are Busy Beavers Weather Song, which was a last-minute decision. My plan was to have this lead into first making the weather mobile from Very Young Learners and from there, into a Dress-a-snowman activity.
The song was FANTASTIC! I reintroduced Lulu and the Cookie Puppet from last year, then used flashcards of hot, sunny, cold, raining, and did a chant to teach the vocab. I also worked on classroom language - today's target was "Listen" and "Repeat". With hand gestures, they GOT it!!! Then we got into the song. They just loved it. We listened the first time, then added gestures the second time...and the third and fourth...
Then I used Cookie to call them back to their desks four at a time.
And then chaos ensued. I could have and should have predicted it. They weren't allowed to get their own colours from their backpacks, so had to share three packs of school colours (for thirty kids). Then, of course, we had to cut out the shapes for the mobiles. There are only six children who are allowed to use scissors, so the other teacher spent a lot of time cutting...and then we had to attach the pieces to the straws.
The book suggests using sticky tape and sewing thread, and I blindly followed instructions. Result - immensely fiddly and slow. The teacher (years of pre-school experience under her belt), pulled out some thin ribbon, such as you might use to tie up a gift to make it look pretty, and a stapler. Excellent idea, one to be remembered and repeated for the rest of my teaching career. You can imagine, however, that this meant those children whose shapes were tied to the straw in boring old cotton, suddenly wanted to rip them all off and have the pretty pink ribbon. *sigh*

Owing to the chaos, we never finished up with the attractive class set of weather mobiles which my over-active imagination had assured me we would. Instead, the kids ended up just stuffing them into their backpacks. I chalked it up to a learning experience for me, and we cleaned up. The kids from last year remembered the Tidy Up song. That was a huge positive. Once we had things in order again, we went back, listened to the song again, did the bye-bye song, and the school bus left, leaving about ten children behind...so we sung Jingle Bells a few times, which leads in nicely to my up-coming lessons - two before Christmas - on the obvious theme!

WHAT I WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME:
This could have been a quick "colour the cloud" activity but still would have been chaos. So...what could I have done? Well, I could have prepared the shapes (cloud, sun, snowman, and umbrella) earlier, and laminated them - a class set so that each child had ONE shape. When their verse came up, they could hold it up...or else, I could do the gestures, and the children with those cards would hold them up. Hmmmm, there's my lead-in for the next lesson!

Phew. Any comments? What would YOU do with this many children?
I've decided to rely on really simple songs from supersimplesongs and wearebusybeavers, making up actions where possible, and using flashcard activites. Two hours is a lot for children to sit still, but this group descends to chaos almost immediately if they get up....