Nostalgic

I helped in my sons Kindergarten class today. It was a fun experience, and good to see that he actually does seem to pay attention and listen to the teacher. And that he's just like all the other kids. Now, I am used to seeing him with other kids his age at T-ball, but it's different being his coach. At T-ball, I know he knows what he's doing and I don't have to spend as much time with him on certain drills because he already knows them. (And not to sound like a bragging parent, but he is one of the better kids on the team.) But I've helped him with his homework and he seems to rush through it. But today at school I helped with what they call 'Stations' which is where the kids break up into three smaller groups and each do a different project. The project for the table I was helping at was making a bunny bag and a bunny ear hat for Easter, even though we don't celebrate religious holidays. They're having a 'Spring Egg Hunt' tomorrow. Why not just call it an Easter Egg hunt? That's what it is. But you gotta be politically correct, thank you very much liberals.

Anyhoo, I remembered how fun Kindergarten was. My job was to read them a story first about the Easter Bunny. His name was Wilbur and he wasn't feeling very good and didn't think that he'd be able to deliver all the Easter baskets. He had a fever and a cough and a runny nose, which prompted two of the four kids at my table to launch into descriptions of their recent illnesses which were very similar to what poor Wilbur was suffering through. Luckily for Wilbur, though, he had a few very helpful friends who were going to deliver the baskets for him. Unfortunatley, they soon discovered that carrying all those baskets was much harder than they thought it would be so they had to go get Wilbur out of bed. Wilbur sacked up and started taking the baskets around but it was almost dawn now and people were out! He had to hide behind trees, and under beds and in laundry while his friends distracted the people of the neighborhood. In the end all the baskets were delivered and Wilbur was able to get back to bed to recover. The End.

After this lovely story the kids were going to make bunny bags with my help. They are paper bags with handles at the top that the kids make a bunny face on with ears, eyes, a nose and whiskers that they had to cut out and then glue onto the bag. Of course before they could glue the eyes and nose on, they had to color eyeballs for their bunny and color the nose. Thus were created the bunny bags. After the bunny bags there was more, now we had to cut out bunny hats. This was accomplished by the kids cutting only along the lines drawn on a giant piece of paper, then having me fold the paper in a very particular way, stapling, taping, hole punching, and stringing yarn through the holes to make was were essentially bonnets with bunny ears on the top. But wait, there's more! After making these hats, and having the kids color some pink in the ears to make them more bunnyish, they got to sort, count, and graph bags of jelly beans. So the kids get their papers, and a bag of beans, and begin to sort out the beans by color. After they're sorted, they color in boxes to show how many of each color, then after this they get to eat the jelly beans. And during this whole hour long process the topics of conversation were just wonderful. We discussed the finer points of such things as Dora the Explorer, Spiderman, Diego, Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, Spongebob and whether dentists were overall good or bad. And we discovered that one of the little girls grandma actually has no teeth at all. But can put some in if she needs to eat or chew things.

It's almost cruel as the kids get to start out with classes like this, having so much fun and talking and making bunny hats, and then in just 7 or 8 short years, they're algebra, difficult english classes where you'll need to find the adjective, predicate, proper nouns, and subject of sentences.

So drift back and remember the wonders of Kindergarten for yourself today. Enjoy the thoughts and memories of a simpler time, where your biggest concern was making sure you colored in the lines.

And I'm going back in a few weeks to help with the computer lab. That's going to be lots of fun.