How and when to tell my 8th grade students has been a thing for me to think about. I knew I wanted to wait until the first doctor's visit. I thought that I might have to tell them soon, especially if I was not feeling well and would not be able to hide it. However, this was not the case at all; I have felt great!
I decided that since most of the teachers I work with knew, the administrators, and even some of my past students, it would only be a matter of time before the secret was out. As part of their warm-up activity on Friday 11/7, I had 5 sentences on the board for the students to look at and determine what the sentences had in common. I had used the word "baby" in some way in the sentence. Sometimes it was a noun, a verb, or even an adjective. My 1st period class was really searching for the language arts answer, and one student said, "They are all simple sentences." I could tell by the look on some of their faces that they had an idea, but did not know what to say. When the answer finally came out, they were super excited and clapped, screamed, and laughed. Some of them are very upset that they will not get to meet Baby Johnson since he/she will be born in the summer. I was amazed at how concerned they were with me. They wanted to know how I had been feeling, what my ideas were for names (and of course they had some!),was I going to teach still next year, and how cool it was going to be to watch me grow. I knew they would be excited, but their level of excitement definitely shocked me! Not a day will go by at school without this baby being mentioned.
