Last night was my first real night of children’s choir. I had no idea what I was facing — how many kids, which kids, what they’d be interested in — which made it hard to plan. I had four kids pre-registered on my roster. Two of those actually showed up, and then new one kid was registered last night (I’d been expecting him, since he was in choir last year). There are a couple more I know of who might end up joining us. So far, this could be a good and relatively easy group, though one of the kids I think might end up coming is a bit of a problem, the kind of kid who somehow changes everyone else’s behavior as soon as he shows up. I can have a room full of angels, and then that one kid shows up and they all turn into crazed demons — and then this kid’s parents will claim that one of the other kids is a bad influence on their perfect angel, which means we can’t use the “do I need to talk to your parents?” threat.

But if I have the kids I had last night and the ones who are on my roster, we could have a fun year and actually do some teaching instead of barely getting through with crowd control. Which I guess means I need to come up with more activities. One positive from having the out-of-control groups is that I don’t have to do much planning, since we spend most of the time wrangling the children.

I’ve broken my streak of having a set of twins in every class. I do have a twin as one of my youth helpers (she was part of one of the sets of twins I had in the past), so maybe that counts, although her twin isn’t also with me this year.

If everyone on the roll shows up, I’ll have close to an even number of boys and girls, maybe with more girls, but I had more boys show up last night. I’d love it if the boys kept with choir, but they tend to drop out, usually when sports kick in, but these kids are already in soccer, and two of this year’s group (a boy and a girl) are in gymnastics. We’ve had to state a “no gymnastics in class because the room is too small, the floor is hard, and we don’t have mats” rule.

You’d think that with all the time I spend around kindergarteners, I should write children’s books, but books for that age kids aren’t actually about kindergarteners, usually. They’re more about funny talking animals. I’d have to get into the mindset of what appeals to them, and I’m really not sure about that.