One week into kindergarten, this is what I have learned about what happens there:
1.) In music class, you stand on big shelfs. There are three shelfs, but really there are six shelfs, because there are three and three together. First position is when you sit down on the shelf, and second position is sit with your back tall, and third position is stand up. The music teacher has a monkey puppet and it whispers to her when kids are not following the rules and then she says Billy, my monkey says you are wiggling and kicking, we need to sit with our back tall in second position.
2.) On the playground, there is sometimes a problem because spiders and bombs don’t really go together. So when we are spiders upside down in our web and then the boys come and say there are bombs there are bombs and we say no there are NOT bombs here because we are spiders and spiders don’t like bombs. So that’s a problem, the spiders and bombs.
3.) When you give the teacher your quarters she gives you your milk card and there is a milk line and you give the teacher your milk card ticket and then you can choose your milk. The chocolate milk is SO GOOD.
(Side note: that afternoon, your mom will start receiving daily emails and messages reminding her that her daughter’s milk account is 50 cents overdrawn and instructing her to deposit money via a website that requires a student id number that does not appear to be on any form that has ever been sent home. Also, I have no idea who she gave the quarters to, because they obviously couldn’t be used to buy the milk.)
4.) We use our towels for rest time after we put our lunchboxes back in our backpack and we rest in the place we chose on the very first day we rested but sometimes Billy is SO LOUD TALKING TALKING TALKING and so that’s not really very restful.
5.) We are practicing our catness behavior and that means be kind be safe be respectful be responsible and when you use catness behavior you can get a green ticket.
(Sidenote: This is a behavior model based on the school mascot, Wildcats. All of the handouts say CATS, not catness, but I am not correcting her because in my head I hear Katniss, and I love the idea of an entire school of children practicing their Katniss behavior.)
It’s been an intense week emotionally: D started kindergarten, T is traveling, and I lost a dear friend who had two teenage sons. So I’m trying as hard as I can to just stay in the moment, be present, and enjoy the small details of their days as they share them with me. As cliché as it is to say this, I am deeply cognizant after this weekend that we have no way of knowing how many of their days we will be lucky enough to share.
First day hugs goodbye.
I teach adults, but I’m really tempted to make a sock puppet that tells me when they’re not following directions.
I love it.
I do think that these conversations with our kids about their days teach us that they really live separate lives. Sometimes I have to pry info out of Robin about her morning at preschool. I flash forward to teenage days, when who knows what’s really happening in math class? When most of her life will involve people and moments that I will never know about? It’s sobering and a little sad, but it’s also exciting to think about how rich their lives are.
Robin is very, very ready for kindergarten. She spent the entire weekend very thrilled about preschool this morning because they are finally going to work on the alphabet, so she can learn to read. She wants this so bad.
I feel like the puppet approach has real strengths. Especially if the puppet could tell when they begin quietly complaining about the readings during small group discussions.
D is starting to read, and she is thrilled every time she gets a word right. Her joy and desire are so intense. I can remember feeling, as a teenager, like my parents knew absolutely nothing about my life, and that being a source of really negative feelings for me: who are you to make these rules for me when you don’t know the first thing about who I am? I think what I’m really trying to figure out now is how do I make sure that she trusts me enough to keep inviting me in, now that her days are so much her own?