Craft Class Week 7: The Monsters Get Emotional

3/3/11
This week's project: Amazing Magnets (Cut out pictures, put them in a bottle cap, fill with amazing glaze resin, bake, and attach a magnet to the back)

Oyyyyyy where to start....
Well I owe a lot of this week's chaos to my own mistakes, My first mistake: thinking there was such a thing as a simple craft class (hahahahhahahah) My second mistake: a shortage of bottlecaps..

I packed enough bottlecaps and magnets for each (of the 12) kids to make 2 magnets, (this might seem stingy, but this was all the magnets we had available at the store) plus a few extra caps to avoid squabbles over color choices.  Everyone chose their caps quickly and began rummaging through the piles of paper and magazines for their perfect images (cats, princesses, dinosaurs etc.) I broke up a few tug of wars and was surprised to find that everyone had their pictures chosen or drawn within a few minutes.  This would seem like great news, however my brain immediately began to panic at the thought of them finishing early and enduring a repeat of last week's mass escape attempts. Also I had spoken with the school director before class and confirmed my suspicions that the kids are in fact supposed to stay with me for the full hour......damn.

One child then announced the possibility of finishing early to the class and asked what we would do when we were done. (PANIC!) "We'll find something to do if we have extra time" I said cooly.  Another child promptly responded that he would go play outside because he is in aftercare. (grroooooaannn!) forced by this innocent presumption, I explained the new policy of strict classroom containment for the full hour...anddddd in doing so pulled the tab on the grenade of chaos and emotions.  The aftercare kid immediately broke down into sobs of "I didn't even want to do craft class! My mom made me do it!!!!" tears materialized out of nowhere, the screamer boy set into the deepest pout I've ever seen, One girl looked at me as though I'd just canceled Christmas and asked "but whyyy?"with big gooey eyes, anddd most of the rest of the girls were thankfully indifferent.

After some sympathizing, I managed to somehow get everyone calmed down and refocused on the project.  Apparently though, this refocusing ignited a creative magnet-making fire in everyone and found me apologetically explaining again why each person could only have two caps.

We started baking next (as the requests for a 3rd cap persisted.) I was once again juggling 14 different tasks at once to appease the little chirps of "Miss Lauren!!" and everything was going fairly smoothly.  Then I noticed a crowd forming around the resin table, and more alarmingly, one little girl crying in the middle of the crowd.  Anddd here we go.

So apparently another girl had said that she didn't like this girl's magnet, which I quickly rationalized with "Well, everybody likes different things, that's why everyone's magnet is going to be different" to a full choir of "Yea but she said it in a mean way!" I took this opportunity to glance around the room in search of the accused "meanie," only to find her on the other side of the room, helplessly hunched over in a ball under a desk crying twice as hard as the alleged victim...

...The reality of the completely doomed class set in at this point and I debated crawling under a desk for a while myself.  Instead I crawled up next the cryer and gave my best effort at soothing and coaxing her out from under the desk.  After 10 minutes of comfortingand several offers of other craft projects, I finally lured her out out of there with the promise of a third bottle cap..of all motivators (I was ready to give this kid my right arm to come out form there and she practically bounced out at the mention of an extra bottlecap)..whatever, call it a success Moments later I was bombarded with demands for a third cap for everyone.  "Fine, here whatever but I have no more magents so this cap won't have a magnet."  5 minutes later I began distributing the magnets and listened politely to each of them tell me "I need 3 magnets" while fighting the urge to implode.

Everyone finished baking and I asked them (more as a joke to myself) to start cleaning up (hahahahhahaha) while their caps cooled.  It was then, as I was sprinting around the classroom picking up paper scraps under the feet of dancing children, I realized that I forgot to pack the magnet glue. Ughhhh. Doom Doom Doom.  Lucky for me, magnets naturally stick to the back of metal bottle caps via this thing called a magnetic charge (Thank you Science!) The kids didn't really seem to care that the magnets weren't permanently adhered, and half the girls tried to turn them into necklaces anyway, so I was saved.

After all that, everyone surprisingly left pretty happy.  The cryers made amends and became best friends again (yay sisterhood!), and me and everyone who didn't sprint out the door at exactly 4:30 played "run form the purple monster" with a wad of unraveled purple ribbon until their parents showed up.  Good times.  Will be stocking the fridge with beer for next week.