A firetruck came to visit Molly’s school today. Here are some pictures.
By the way, Molly is not yet able to pronounce her “T” sound, ugh less “TR”, and she substitutes “F” instead. So when she told us about the firetruck, it sounded like a weird, nasty word at first.
Claire’s class has been learning about America and the presidents recently. One assignment was for each kid to write what they would do if they were president. Claire’s, as usual, focuses on being nice:
This assignment was posted outside the classroom. Almost every kid in the class said something about helping other people, especially people in need. Prospective presidents would “help kids go to school”, “help people that don’t have food”, “help people who were really hurt”, “help homeless people”, “give the people clothes”, and even “give the people money.” This is basically the opposite of what we hear in the current Republican presidential debates, the theme of which is largely not helping people. I’d vote for the kindergarten kids. There was one loose cannon in the class, though, who promised to “go into a war” as president. Claire thought maybe he was confused when he wrote that.
Here is Claire’s other America-relate assignment, which also came out pretty sweet.
For Martin Luther King Day, Claire’s class had an assignment write their own dream. They had to fill complete the sentence, “I have a dream to…” with their own writing. Claire’s used her hard-earned writing and phonics skills to come up with this:
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| “I have a dream to help others when they are hurt.” |
Nice touch, Claire.
Continuing with the new art samples series, here are the latest highlights from Claire and Molly. This covers the last batch to come home from school before the holiday break.
As usual, Claire’s drawings are full of cryptic words that are a really nice, courageous shot at sounding out the words phonetically.
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| “You are a flower” |
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| I can’t tell what this one is trying to say, but I like it. |
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| No idea what “GOTAN” is, but I love this picture. It looks like it’s out of a botanist’s field journal. |
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| This one is infused with a bit of Christmas cheer. |
Molly is making her mark with finger paint and stickers.
One issue with kindergarten so far has been trying to squeeze in the time to focus on Claire’s home projects (aka homework assignments). Usually these assignments are fun and creative, such as Disguise-a-Turkey, where Claire was given a picture of a turkey and had to turn it into something else so that it did not get eaten for Thanksgiving. That one did not go so well, though. We spent several days trying to get Claire focused on the assignment, but she just wasn’t “feeling” it, maybe because her time to work on these projects is also her grumpiest, most unfocused time of the day: late afternoon after school before we pick of Molly, or the 30 minutes before bed (which is otherwise “free time”). This was tricky to complete because the instructions were very specific about the kid doing the project, with only minimal help from parents. But without any real interest from Claire, we ended up with a somewhat random splattering of sparkle paint, which Claire declared a fairy, finally completed the night before it was due just before bedtime.
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| Claire McG’s Family Holiday Traditions |
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| The Disguise-a-Turkey project, for matter of comparison. |
Claire’s kindergarten class now has an internal mail system up and running. The kids can send each other notes in the classroom’s mailbox. So far, Claire has received several letters from her classmates, and they all say, “You are a great friend.”
I was talking about Monkey Mail with some of Claire’s classmates’ parents, and they said their kids all get the same message, “You are a great friend.” And they always have a picture of the two kids standing next to each other. It is very sweet. Here is a perfect example.
We all got to go to our first carnival for Claire’s school tonight! This was a big, crazy shindig to raise money for the school. After weeks of volunteer forms, raffles, meetings, and contests, the carnival finally manifested itself tonight between 5:30 and 8:30. Usually Molly starts to bed at 6:30, and Claire at 7:30, but we went wild tonight and let them stay out for the carnival until about 8:30!
Claire had lots of fun doing a giant, bouncy slide and basically just jumping around and giggling with her friends. Molly also had fun, but she did not get to actually do a whole other than watch other people have fun, but that was still pretty good. Molly loved watching the aforementioned giant, bouncy slide, and she yelled and cheered like a cheerleader as each kid come down the slide.
The end of the night included some meltdowns from out tires, weary carnival-goers, as expected for a late, exciting night. Claire’s happened when the haunted house was closed and we could not go into it, even though lots of people were still in the house at the time. They had stopped taking in new customers since the wait was an hour, and the fair was going to close before that. To Claire, this did not seem quite right. Molly didn’t care about the haunted house, but she was getting tired and cranky in her own right. So we got home and tossed the kids in bed and discovered that we were exhausted too. But we had an awfully fun night and pitched in a little bit of money for the school in the process.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Molly’s school pictures for 2011-2012.
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| Molly’s class with Ms. Jenny and Ms. Kate. |
Today in kindergarten, Claire did a school assignment called “My Favorite Things”. Claire was given a small book and had to fill in her answer to various questions about her favorite things, plus add an illustration. I’m not really up for scanning each page into the blog, but here is a sample page and the full text:
It may be interesting to do some sort of regular “interview” in this blog, so look out for this type of thing again in the future. They will all be available under the label “interview”.
McG Kids 