Dressed in primary colors and huge red wooden apples stretching the lobes of her ears down to the ground, Ms. Mancel dabbed a few drops of lavender oil onto the back of her wrists to relieve her headache. She ran her fingers through her thinning hair and adjusted her school bus shaped name tag. The Witch was ready to greet the kindergarteners.
She charmed her way into a teaching position without a teaching license. Being a witch and all, that wasn't hard to do. She charmed the Fixer once before after all, a long time ago. She cunningly convinced him, as well as many others, that she's a frail female and utterly helpless.
All the materials were prepared, worksheets printed off, name tags taped on the tables, and procedures outlined nicely in the lesson plan book (with a few modifications penciled in by the Witch).
Ms. Mancel, better known as simply the Witch, looked at the clock and dashed off to meet the children as the buses began to pull up.
Ms. Mancel spied a few kindergarteners bouncing on their seats, smiling out the window to no one in particular. The students got off the bus and were sorted into two lines. Immediately, one little girl with brown pigtails started to cry. However, the children were sorted into two lines: one line for Ms. Mancel's class and one for Mr. Hanson's class.
As the class filed past her and she bent down to sniff the head of one plump pigtailed girl, “Unspoiled, fresh,” the witch thought. She sniffed the head of the other, “Diet of vegetables, fruit, no deserts and only the leanest meats, we'll leave this one for the birds.”
After introductions and a short getting-to-knowyou game, Ms. Mancel started a math lesson.
She drew a pattern on the white board, one red dot and one green dot. She asked the children how many dots she made. “Two!” Then she repeated the pattern. One red, one green, one red, one green. How many now? “Four!”
She opened a package of red licorice whips with her teeth (the plastic “Safe-t” scissors she found in her desk drawer couldn't even cut a piece of paper). She distributed these along with cups of sugary fruit flavored cereal and threw away the lip stick stained wrapper.
“Who can count to four for me?” Most of the children raised their hands. “Count out four pieces of cereal and show them to me!” The children who had previously raised their hands did what they were told, the others copied off of them.
The Witch walked around and observed, “Good! Once you have counted to four for me, you can eat your cereal.”
Ms. Mancel transitioned into the art lesson. She placed bowls of all sorts of different candy and poured the rest of the contents from the cereal box for the students (which they started to eat right away) and passed out glue bottles and paper plates. “Make a picture of yourself or someone you love!”
The kindergarteners spent the next twenty minutes working hard to create renditions of themselves or mom or dad or Superman, using candy corn and chocolate chips.
“Line up for lunch! Today we're having Party Pizza, Crazy Carrots, Silly Strawberries, and a Carmel Sweet Roll. Remember to eat everything on your tray, it's very important. You need to eat everything to grow up big and strong.” The children raced to be first in line to try the crazy carrots and silly strawberries.
At the end of the day, Ms. Mancel accompanied the children out back to the buses. The kindergarteners ambled slowly to their destination. It was the nap time snack that did them in; a gourmet cheese plate with two different kinds of crackers and green grapes on the side.
A few more weeks and they'll be ripe, smiled the Witch.