Pumpkin’s progress April 30, 2010

Ahh, Pumpkin.  He continues to be delightful every day.  And he’s not quite the same person he was in September; he has come a loooong way.

Today in the blocks corner he was with Raspberry and another girl, both of whom hate to put away the blocks, and move so slowly that it makes me crazy.  They did much better than usual at cleanup time, but Pumpkin ROCKED.  He was so mature, so independent, picking up blocks and putting them away in exactly the right places, doing it happily, doing it quickly….I was so proud of him.  When we gathered on the carpet for story time I gave him a star on his hand for being so great at cleanup time, and he crowed. “Wow!  Yay!  I got a star!  Whoo hoo!”

At writer’s workshop yesterday, however, he reminded me of his old self — the one who could not hold a conversation to save his life.

“What’s your story about, Pumpkin?”

“This is me.  My mom hit me in the face.”

“She did?  Was it an accident?”  (There is no way his mom hit him in the face on purpose.  Seriously.)

“No!  She hit me in the face!”  He was grinning as he said it.  I replied, “That sounds like a very serious story.  What else goes in the picture?”

Pumpkin didn’t answer, just forged ahead.  Here follows his narrative, with the ellipses standing in for my weak, confused, useless responses.

“Here’s me.  I hit her in the face!  And my mom hit me in the face….And I didn’t get ice cream.  But my dad did, he had ice cream….I didn’t get ice cream.  There was a contest and I didn’t win.  My dad had ice cream…Here’s my dad, here’s me.  I had ice cream.  There was a contest, but I didn’t win….But there was another contest, and then I’ll win….Here’s my mom, she has ice cream….Here’s my mom and my dad and me and we’re eating ice cream…And here’s the flag….And here’s the hot lava!”

smelly March 8, 2010

We are learning about the Five Senses and I decided that this week, we should focus on one sense each day.  Today was Smell Day.  Last night I put various food items with distinctive scents into little plastic tubs, and today I sat at the science center at centers time and the kids stopped by to check out the smells.

Lemon was popular, as were cinnamon and peanutbutter.  They were confused by sesame oil, and split on onions.  “My mom!” exclaimed one little boy, whose English is limited.  He didn’t like the smell but he was happy to be reminded of something with which his mother cooks.  My vanilla smelled weird — I thought they’d love the smell, but it didn’t smell right.  I wonder if storing it plastic overnight made it smell a little bitter.  The vinegar was universally hated.  The kids made awesome funny faces when they smelled it.

After I had closed up shop, Pumpkin and Zucchini asked if they could check out the smelling tubs (Zucchini has to spend a lot of time in the writing center each day writing people letters for their mailboxes, and Pumpkin loves the Kid K’nex we have in the block corner right now), so I said yes.

They both loved the vinegar.

“Really?!”  I asked.  “Are you sure?  You like it?”

“Yeah!”  they said, grinning.  Two little thumbs up.  “That smells good.”

never a dull moment March 2, 2010

So Pumpkin walks in the room and says to me, with a devilish grin on his face, “Bagina!”

Um.

While I tried to figure out how to respond, he said it again.  “Bagina!”  And he giggled.

“Pumpkin, honey,” I said in a quiet voice.  “That’s a private parts word.  It’s not a school word.”

“Blagina!”  He said, and pointed at the boy next to him.

Um, what?

“What do you mean?”

“Blageena!”

I was still puzzled.

“Blageenza!”

“You mean, he’s wearing blue jeans?!”  The boy he was pointing to was indeed wearing blue jeans.

Pumpkin nodded and giggled.  “Blajeanza!”  I felt quite relieved.

“Oh, okay.  Blue jeans.  Got it.”

Then he whispered to me.  “Bagina.”

I gave up.

*****************

Pumpkin has a little Mini-Me in our class.  Let’s call him Squash.  Squash is the Spanish-speaking version of Pumpkin, in lots of ways.  For one thing, he is dead cute.  Everyone loves him.  Just like Pumpkin, he always has a big smile on his adorable little round face.  And just like Pumpkin, he marches to the beat of his own drummer.

At storytime today Squash kept wiggling around and bugging the kids around him.  I reminded him to sit and listen, but to no avail.  Then I saw him pluck a hair off the head of the child next to him!  Turns out he’d plucked hairs from THREE kids around him, and none of them had complained!  He didn’t seem to understand that this was not okay.  He was holding the hairs and looking at them, fascinated, while the three victims stared at him dolefully.  Miss Slinger had to take him to the office to have the Spanish interpreter talk to him.  When she brought him back  she was trying not to giggle.  Later she told me, “he’s just so freakin’ cute!”

Cute or not, I hope he doesn’t pull out any more hairs.

on death and dying February 4, 2010

At our centers time meeting I was picking clothespins out of the bag, calling children, and asking them where they wanted to work, when Pumpkin raised his hand and waved it around urgently.  I thought he was going to tell me which center he wanted to work at, to which I would have replied, “honey, wait until I pull out the clothespin with your name on it, and then I’ll ask you where you want to work.”

“Yes, Pumpkin?”

“Teacher, I don’t want to die!  I don’t want to die.”  He shook his head and then looked at his lap.  Yikes.  Not what I was expecting.

“Oh, honey, you’re not going to die for a really really really long time.  It’s going to be okay.”  I had to keep pulling out clothespins and calling names, but finally I got to him.  “Pumpkin, where do you want to work?”

“Art.  But I don’t want to die.”

“I know, it’s scary to think about.  Come here, honey.”

He stood in front of me.  “If I die my mom and dad and brother won’t have me around anymore.”  He looked like he was going to cry.

“Do you know someone who died?”  He nodded.  “Who?”

He mumbled.  “Who died?” I asked again.  He pointed.  It was a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Oh, you’re talking about Dr. King?!”  He nodded again, and this time really looked close to tears.

“Do you want to sit on my lap?”  He nodded, then got on my lap and sighed.  “Pumpkin, it was really sad when Dr. King died.  But I don’t usually think about that.  I like to think about his life.  Did you know that he was a daddy?  He used to play with his kids, and read stories to them, and tuck them in at night.  And he did a lot of wonderful things for us.  Remember how we talked about how black people couldn’t go to the same schools with white people?  And they had to sit at the back of the bus, and they had to drink from different water fountains and swim in different pools?  That was terrible, and mean.  Dr. King helped change that.  He made this world a better place, and that’s what I like to think about when I think about him.”

Pumpkin grinned, and hopped off to go to math to make a snowman and count the buttons.  Zoom!  He was all better, and I was overwhelmed, once again, by what a privilege it is to be a preschool teacher some days.

counting with Pumpkin January 20, 2010

So, on a lighter note, I tried working with Pumpkin today on the numbers 1-10.  I haven’t written about him much lately, because he is really growing up and is doing so well in school.  He is much less likely to interrupt, much less likely to start to scream because someone took his lego, and unfortunately, much less likely to say really wild and creative things.

However, he is not too firm on the numbers 1-10 yet, so at centers time I pulled him from the sand table, and had him work with me in the empty block corner with big laminated number cards that I made.

First I flipped over one card at a time and asked him, “what number?”  He knew all of them except 9 and 10, and one other small number, I forget which one.

“Great!  Now, let’s put them in a line in order, because they are all mixed up.  Which number comes first?”

He smiled at me.  No clue.

“When you start to count, which number do you say first?”

“Two!”  He crowed.

“We start with two?  Are you sure?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay, how about you count my fingers.  We’ll see which number comes first.”  I held up my hand.

Pumpkin reached out and touched a finger.  “One…”

“That’s it!”  I said.  “We start counting with one!”  Pumpkin laughed delightedly.  “Okay,” I said, “let’s put the one in the first place.”  He was able to find the one card and put it down.

“What number comes after one?”  He had to count my fingers again to figure out that it was two.

“Now what number comes after two?”  Pumpkin grinned at me, but again, no clue.

“Okay, honey, count my fingers again.”  He pointed to my ring finger and said, “One…”

I interrupted him.  “Let’s start with my pinkie finger for one.”

He pointed at my pinkie finger and continued, “Two…”

“Oops, no, honey, start over with one.”

Finally he counted to THREE.  I was practically sweating at this point.

*****

After getting through five, I asked, “What number comes after five?”  He didn’t know, so I held up two hands so he could count.  He counted the fingers on one hand, and then stopped.  When I indicated that he should keep counting, using my other hand, he pointed to the thumb of that hand and said, “One…”

He really had no idea that after five comes six.  So I walked him through the numbers to ten, and finally, finally we had them all on the floor in order.  Then I asked him to step on the number I said.  He thought that would be great.

“Three.”  Pumpkin went and stood on the number eight.  Eight and three do look a lot alike, but Pumpkin wasn’t able to think about the fact that three is a small number, and that it is near the beginning, not too far from one.  I don’t think he has any sense yet of the numbers in relation to each other.

*****

Pumpkin had a wonderful time, and he did get some more, much-needed exposure to the numbers.  I was tickled by his enthusiasm, and a little tired when I thought about how far we have yet to go.

Friday December 11, 2009

We made it.  Today was hard for all of us.  I woke up with a migraine, and Miss Slinger was tired and stressed from having her car get towed because of the snow (she spent the evening — and a lot of money — getting it back).  The kids, like the little emotional barometers they are, reacted accordingly.  There is a little girl in my class I haven’t introduced you to yet — let’s call her Papaya — who is absolutely terrific.  She is smart and funny and I’m just crazy about her.

Papaya hit two kids and told another — repeatedly — “you are not my friend.”  It was bizarre, and utterly unlike her.

Cherry, not suprisingly, had a hard time following directions all morning and it was really frustrating for me.  Chutney towed the line, however.

Our new girl had a tantrum and sobbed for the last 15 minutes of class (because I asked her to clean up the markers and she didn’t want to).

Zucchini looked a little stressed by all the hubbub, and the tone of my increasingly exasperated voice.  He kept raising his hand to tell me what the class was supposed to be doing.  It was kind of cute.

Pumpkin, amazingly, did fine.  He has really come a long way.  Okay, he fell apart when it was time to go home and he had to put on his snowpants.  “My pants are bunched up in there!  I hate it!” he wailed.  But until the last few minutes, he was fine.

And now that it is Friday evening and I am at home, so am I.

Pumpkin’s urgent mission November 25, 2009

I was reading a story the other morning, with lots of interruptions from a wiggly class, when Pumpkin interrupted me, while raising his hand (he is sort of getting the idea).

“Teacher! Teacher!  I have to go save the world!”

I looked at him, nonplussed.

“I have to go!  I have to go right now!  I have to save the world!”  He was still raising his hand, jabbing it at the sky, urgently.

I thought about how to respond.  “Honey?  Can we finish the story first, and then you can save the world?”

He thought about it seriously, and then agreed.

And we are all still here, so obviously, it worked.

the first thanksgiving — an eyewitness account November 24, 2009

Yesterday I told the children the story of the first Thanksgiving, in my own words.  Someone, maybe Cherry, interrupted me.

“Were you there?”

“No, I wasn’t there.  This happened hundreds of years ago.”  I continued with my story.  A few minutes later Pumpkin interrupted me.

“Were you there?”

“No, honey, I wasn’t there.  I’m [fill in the blank] years old.  The first Thanksgiving was hundreds of years ago.”  Pumpkin looked at me, uncomprehending.  Any number over ten is meaningless to him.  I sighed, and forged on.  I had gotten to the part about the “funny” clothing the Pilgrims wore when I was interrupted again.  I forget who it was.

“Did you wear those clothes, too?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Later, feeling ancient, I told the story to Miss Mellow when she came in to teach the afternoon class.  She laughed and said that I must have told the story with so much enthusiasm and detail that they assumed they were hearing a first-person account.

Yes, children, I came over on the Mayflower.

snapshots of the day November 4, 2009

*Cherry and Chutney got bus write-ups last week that showed up in my mailbox only this morning.  They were defiant to the bus driver and refused to sit down on the bus.  And Cherry called Chutney the B word.

*A staffer whose grandson is in my class told me that he had really paid attention to my lesson yesterday.  I tried to remember what lesson that might have been.  She said, “he knows all the three-dimensional shapes now.  He told me, ‘did you know that the other name for a ball shape is a sphere?’ and also told me about cubes, cylinders, and cones.”  I was tickled.  Someone was listening!

*Plum showed up after two days at home and burst into tears.  “What’s wrong, honey?” “I…want…my…DADDY!” she sobbed.  She sobbed all the way to the local library, so, for the first hour of the morning.  At the library she sat on Miss Slinger’s lap whimpering, and then fell asleep in her arms.  I spent most of story time trying to track down her parents, who finally showed up when we were back at school.

*I got a new student, who moved to my class from the afternoon class.  She knows Miss Slinger, and the room, but not me.  She was dressed in a t-shirt and a thin sweatshirt today, and it was very cold out (in the 30s).  I tried to give her a jacket to wear to the library, but she refused.  I gave her a partner to hold hands with, and she refused.  So she held my hand all the way there.  Miss Mellow told me later that the new girl is very moody, that mom didn’t show up for her parent conference — twice — and that the girl came to school once with a warm jacket, and not again since.

*Because of very poor test scores, the third through fifth grade teams were shaken up, and a few teachers were removed from classroom teaching (they will be doing supplemental teaching instead).  At least one teacher was in tears.  Emotions were running high.  I wish the Prince had done this back in June, but I think he did the right thing, better late than never.  It’s inexcusable when certain teachers’ students don’t make a year’s worth of progress.  Our students are so far behind they really need to make well more than a year’s progress.  Less than a year?  Shameful.

*We read Knuffle Bunny for the second time (I’m back to doing Repeated Interactive Readalouds), and at the end, I asked, “have you ever lost something?”  After we heard about a lost ball and a lost car, I told them about a time when I lost my favorite mittens.  Pumpkin looked very concerned.  He raised his hand.  “Teacher, I can give you my red mittens.  Let me go get them for you.”  And he was about to get up before I stopped him, and assured him that I have since replaced the lost mittens.  He tried again at dismissal time to give me his red mittens.  So sweet.

*Zucchini had so much fun at recess that he forgot to tell me he needed to go pee.  He had a change of clothes in his backpack — but the pants were shorts!  So the poor kid went home in a warm jacket, hat, mittens, boots….and shorts.

*I visited Miss Mellow’s class, with her okay, to talk to them about all the stuff in the room, and how most of it is stuff I paid for.  I talked to them about respecting books, and how to take care of them, and where to put them (the Mo Willems books go in the Mo Willems box, not the ABC box, and the farm books go on the shelf, not in the color box).  I also showed them how to clean up the house corner and where everything goes there.  Later Miss Slinger told me that they did a much better job of clean up after their centers time.

*I spent two hours finishing writing up a post-observation report.  It made me cranky.  I don’t think I want to be a mentor next year.

pumpkin, my pumpkin October 27, 2009

The special ed teacher who comes to my class once a week to work with two of my other babies pulled me aside after class the other day.

“You know, I was watching Pumpkin today and he seems like he’s doing much better.  He’s even in line right now, with the other kids.”

She’s right.  He has been learning.  He has learned school routines, and he knows where he’s supposed to be at any given time, and even what he is supposed to be doing.  He still interrupts me, but he is more likely to be able to answer questions, or to be on-topic in a conversation.

When we did our letter sounds today, he looked at me when I showed the M card, rubbed his tummy, grinned, and said, “MMMMM!”