This is why kids need to understand idioms…

Idioms – a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words.

Did you think of teaching your kids how to understand idioms?

This story really happened to a friend of ours when we lived in South Carolina, and I thought it was so funny, I submitted it to Readers Digest several years ago. Unfortunately, Readers Digest didn't think it was funny enough to publish. But you be the judge.

It was early in the school year when Mr. Sisti, a high school art teacher in South Carolina, assigned his ceramics students to clean the dried clay off the ceramic molds in their classroom. The students had just begun cleaning the molds when one of the girls exclaimed, “Mr. Sisti, I can’t get the clay off this mold.”

“Why don’t you get a rag and a bucket of soapy water,” he told her. “Then just use a lot of elbow grease to clean it off.”

A few moments later Mr. Sisti noticed this same student walking around the classroom, pulling out file drawers and looking in cabinets.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. I just can’t find it,” she answered.

“You can’t find what?” he queried.

“The elbow grease.”