Understanding Mom...

 Years ago my brother had a toy that he loved.  It was great for creativity, fine motor skills, and skills such as sorting.   Despite the hundreds of little plastic bricks my mom bought for my brother, they still remained a pain.  The dreaded Lego's... or Toe Crunchers as my mom called them.   I LOVED them... even if I only built with the pieces my brother wasn't using.  That is unless I went into my brothers room when he was gone to build buildings.

However today... I felt my mothers distain for these plastic little blocks.  There was a total meltdown involving half of the class today on who gets to play with the new legos.  Nine kids with tears streaming down their face.   Not only that but we had a sub because the lead teacher was out today.  I had no clue what to do, so I followed what I thought the lead teacher would do, say "okay, we're going to fight then I'm putting the legos in the closet".  Mistake 1.

So my next solution was to divide up the tub into three big bowls (Seriously huge bowls) and put two kids at each bowl.  That meant almost half of the class would be at the legos and it was decided that I would put the kids at the bowls according to the class list.  Did this solve the issue? Not completely but the next meltdown only involved two students and lasted maybe 3 minutes max.  

Do I consider that a success... Absolutely.