Snippets from School

In reading class, my third graders ran across the word "cannibal", so I asked it they knew what it meant. They were very puzzled, but one girl finally figured it out, "Cannibals are the people who live in Canada."
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I read my class a math picture book. It ended with the poem "As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives..."
We were working on multiplication, so I drew the man and his seven wives on the board.
My class of eight year olds (all boys) were amazed: "Wow, that's a lot of wives!"
"Yeah, one for every day of the week! Sorry, honey, you're not my wife today; it's a different one."
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One of my students was very excited because they'd gotten new gravel delivered for their driveway, and it was "full of maggots". He wanted to know if he could bring some in to show.
Maggots???
"Did you mean agates?" I asked.
"Oh yeah, agates!"
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I'm starting a unit on habitats and animals' needs in second grade. I gave a brief pretest asking what wild animals need in order to survive. One little guy listed: "Animals need food, like apples; and to run and play and tiptoe." Tiptoe?
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My introduction to one student one year:
"Miss A., Miss A.! Henry's blowing his nose in his hand and throwing it on people!"
I didn't have to ask whether the accusation was true; evidence was dripping from his face and hands.
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Today we were talking about how smoke and hot air rise. So one of my little guys thought it over: "So then if we sweat a lot, does that mean we can fly?"
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As we were sorting transportation toys into "same" and "different", I decided to challenge my very analytical preschooler to sort by something other than color or type. "Travis, do airplanes go on the road?" (Hoping we could start to sort by "road" and "not road".) "Well..." he spoke slowly, "when it lands it goes on the road."