Mayflower in Rm 14

Several years ago, while teaching 4th Grade, I was attempting to make the Pilgrims plight and their voyage in the Mayflower more meaningful to my students. I had a small, about 3x5 in. drawing of a cut away view of their tiny ship and wanted to enlarge it to be bulletin board size, about 4x6 ft.. I told the class that I would put the copy under the large overhead projector, project it on to a huge piece of bulletin board paper I had taped to cover the green chalkboard and make a huge tracing the ship. I would then make a second tracing of the body of the ship and they could cut out the small sections of the boat and draw and color the contents of each room or area complete with several pilgrims. Finishing that, we would put the whole thing on our hall bulletin board for everyone to see. They became very excited wanted to see this all take place, but I told them that they should eat their lunch, go out to recess and see how the work was progressing afterwards. The lunch hour quickly sped by while I hurriedly traced the big ship onto the paper with a large heavy duty magic marker. I was just about finished with the top rigging when they returned to class. They were amazed to see the Mayflower almost completed and in a few minutes we had the second tracing down and they were busy coloring their individual sections of the cross sections of the ship. Soon I was ready to remove the big underneath tracing and take it to the hall bulletin board. Everyone was excited and things were going well. That is until I took the tracing down. There, underneath, the tracing was the Mayflower's heavy duty black outline on my chalkboard! Big and black and permanent!! I threw my hands to my face and stepped back in horror. The children chimed in with, "Mrs. Sibbett what did you do ?" Permanent marker on my two chalkboards in the shape of the Mayflower!! And I had no idea of how to get it off. Chalkboards had risen to the state that you really weren't suppose to just wash them and permanent markers were just that, PERMANENT! To say the least the project for the afternoon had changed remarkably. After about half and hour of problem solving, a few students went to get our favorite janitor. I would have loved to see that encounter with those ten year olds and our janitor. Somehow the students explained my mistake, our awful finding and our struggles to find a solution. When he came into the room, he was trying to hide (and not very successfully) his chuckle and smile. Luckily, and wonderfully, he was pretty sure he could clean it off! That day, all gratitude lessons aside, twenty students and one teacher were very thankful for our janitor! The next day we returned to find a clean chalkboard and set the Mayflower sailing in the hall.