Practicing Letter Sounds

Because G is a bit behind, I'm becoming adept at disguising reading skill practice. "I Spy" has varied to "I Spy Something that Rhymes with". We look for numbers and letters on signs.  G helps me count things out and tally dollars spent in our grocery shopping list. 

G takes after his mother. 

On the ride home tonight, I distracted a whiny G by telling him that two raccoons had just run near the car and I'd almost hit them. 

"Raccoon!  R!  Rrr, rrr, rrr!  Raccoon starts with arrrrgh!"

He'd made an adorable paper bag raccoon puppet weeks ago. 

I'm pretty sure the cute puppet's tongue and bottom lip are supposed to be attached to the bag and not the bag of Raccoon's face. I'm also pretty sure the coloring is toward the scribble scrabble end of the coloring spectrum. 

"Rrrr, like rrrr, rrr, rrrroadkill," I answered. 

He shot back, "Like rrr, rrr, rrrun over."

Teamwork

Friday night: We run out of dish soap.
Saturday afternoon text to Josh: I forgot to pick up dish soap while I was out.
Sunday morning, wife to husband: Do you want to run out and get the dish soap or should I?


Sunday afternoon activity: wife washes, husband dries

5 Year Old's Response to "The 23 Craziest Japanese Inventions You Never Knew Existed"

This was on my Facebook feed this morning: http://justsomething.co/23-craziest-japanese-inventions-you-never-knew-existed/.  G happened to be nearby, and after I perused the link, I decided to see what he thought about the inventions.  I wish I could remember who to credit with the idea.  I'd read someone else's child's reaction to Pop culture somewhere. 


Highlights of The 23 Craziest Japanese Inventions You Never Knew Existed, According to G
my thoughts are in pink italics

1.  That's a pipe.  It hangs from an umbrella and it keeps you from getting wet.  That lady is not going to get wet. 


2.  What is that?  I'm going to break it.  *punches at phone screen*


4. That's funny.  You can do this *pantomimes unrolling most of a roll of toilet paper*.  For your nose, like this.  *pantomimes blowing nose*  And then you can use it for this *unroll, unroll, unroll, unroll, butt wipe, dissolution into giggles and snorts*
I am reminded of this photo, hanging in our bathroom:

6.  What is that baby wearing?...Oh, it cleans the floor?  That's funny.  And he goes like this *sniper crawls*.


8.  Those are for ear drops.  No, eye drops.  They go in that thing and into your eyes. 


11.  Why is she putting her head in an ink pad?


14.  That's a banana.  The minions love bananas on Minion Rush!


Note: We blew past 17.  I am not ready to hear what he may say. 


21.  Um, what is that?  Why she wearing that?  Wait, the noodle can't get on her now!  Now they won't be in her hair. 


23.  Square pumpkins!  We have been watching Spookly a lot lately.  I want a square pumpkin!...Wait, it's a watermelon?

Parent Teacher Conferences

Seventeen. This is year seventeen in my teaching career.

Five.  This is year five in the parent role at Parent-Teacher Conferences.

One.  This is the first year I have ever had any concern for my son's progress.

B has always been a good student.  He listens well, reads well, and calculates well.  He loves science and history.  His handwriting is borderline illegible, and he produced a failed writing piece a time or two.  However, no one has ever doubted his progress.

G is arguably smarter than B.  His entire life has been spent sitting stiller than his brother for stories. He plays with words and remembers everything.  He started Sunday School classes earlier, and talks about Vacation Bible School more than his brother.

This year at Parent-Teacher Conferences, G's kindergarten teacher shared her concerns about G's progress.  He does not color in the lines, nor can he write his name in recognizable letters.  He shows no ability to rhyme.  He recognizes only a handful of letters. He's sweet and he is well behaved at school, but he is struggling academically.

I took in all this news alone, as Josh was working.  This is uncharted territory.  Everything academic comes pretty easily to B and had seemed to come easily to G...except G hasn't wanted to play along.  So I haven't pushed him much.  Red will uprise against lessons at home.

I texted Josh the news on the way to B's conference--where, incidentally I learned that B is soaring through schoolwork.  I was picturing my boy repeating kindergarten and hating school because of it.  I'd been so cool about him repeating if necessary, since he'd just turned five the week before.  The reality of truly having to hold him back was much more menacing than I'd thought.

Then my husband, who did not excel at school and still spells atrociously, texted me back to reality.  G is little, he likes school, and "roam wasnt built in a day".

You know what?  He's right!  G has not been to preschool.  We haven't pushed letters and writing his name due to his Viking attributes.  He listens well, participates.  He's learned a handful of letters and their sounds, he can write his name, he's picked up coloring and he's connecting dots.  He knows a couple sight words and can write them.  He's learned all that in just a few weeks.
Even seventeen-year veteran teachers need to be schooled once in a while.

Sidekicks

Have I mentioned Whiskers?  G's sidekick is the stuffed animal rendition of the mousie character in If you Give a Mouse a Cookie.  Whiskers is with G so often that I have a special album for the pair on my Facebook page.  Whiskers has become so famous with my friends that visiting friends have asked to pose with G and Whiskers.  

So when I went for a haircut yesterday, Whiskers watched from a nearby chair.  As Kim cut my hair, she and I talked about snuggly childhood friends. She told me the how her daughter's stuffed BFF was accidentally lost, and I told her about Johnny, the Monchichi style monkey my dad gave me when I was two.  Johnny also had a sad story.  After college, I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night to find my graduation-present puppy gnawing Johnny's hands to bits.

Josh and I were dating at the time.  He found a doll repair lady, smuggled Johnny out, and brought him back after "surgery" a new man.  Johnny was a very new man, actually slightly higher on the evolutionary scale.  Doll Lady could not find four-fingered monkey hands like Johnny was born with, so she replaced his hands with proportionally correct human hands.  Instead of a thumb to suck, Johnny's opposable thumb gripped a baby bottle.

I had not realized that my sons had never heard that story.  In the car, G asked, "Is Johnny the monkey with the face like this?"  Then he perfectly imitated the matted doll that sits on a shelf in my curio cabinet.  He asked me questions about Johnny, like what Riley did to his hands, and how Daddy got them fixed, and what an opposable thumb was.  When we got home, both sons wanted to see Johnny in person.  Seconds after I opened the cabinet, G shut the door and announced that Johnny had to stay in there so he could be safe.

This morning, G moved my banana trophy to the curio cabinet.

Johnny sits between the most thoughtful teacher gift I've ever received, the ceramic bowl I made in elementary school, and our cake topper.  Now my trophy resides next to Johnny as well.   

G and I have had several conversations about Johnny today.  Johnny's favorite food is bananas.  Whisker's favorite thing to eat is cookies.  We bet that they'd both love banana cookies.  They also both like milk, but Johnny still drinks his from a bottle.  Whiskers prefers a straw.  Johnny and Whiskers hung out in and by the curio cabinet today, and they said goodnight to each other tonight.  I think that those two will be great friends while Whiskers waits for G to come home from kindergarten this year.  Who knows?  They may even be roomies in a curio cabinet one day.  

Sticky Situation

Last Friday, we attended a presentation on owls by a local Rehabilitation Center.  The boys got to see four live owls and hear about the four common owls in Virginia.  A couple of friends were there with kids as well, and afterwards we chatted as most of the kids ran around in the grass.  The youngest child in the group sat in her stroller and giggled.

The peace was broken when my friend's daughter announced that G had killed a frog.  I froze.  Usually, I can discern how much a scene I should cause with discipline, but this was either something to let go or go really crazy about.  I mean, I thought I'd heard once that serial killers often killed small animals early on in their lives.  Where do frogs fit on the killing spectrum?  Are they closer to the kitten end or are they way on the spiders and creepy-crawlies end?  We regularly crush bugs at our house.  Did I need to contact a therapist?  All this decision making with a ticking clock that was counting off the seconds between the action and appropriate response.

The girl bent down, prodded the stretched-out frog, and deemed him dead.  He looked splat to me, too.  Then she carefully covered it with grass clippings to bury it.  One of her nearby friends watched, as did a laughing G, who was chanting, "I killed it!"

So how did I handle it?  I asked my friend with the baby and her mother-in-law, since they were standing there.  None of us had a clue.  So I called G to me, took him by the hand, and had him show me what he did.  Then I put on the sad face and noted how little the frog was, and how much he might have been a little baby.  I wondered if his parents would be looking for him.  G was not empathetic at all.  Then I suggested that some frogs stay small, that this one might have been a Daddy Frog, and that his baby and the rest of the family might wonder where he was when he never came home.

G looked a teeny tiny bit shaken and he squeezed my hand a little.  Very softly, I told him, "We don't kill frogs, Buddy.  They eat the bugs."

G watched the funeral.  Then a few moments later--Hallelujah!--the frog broke free from the clippings and hopped into the grass nearby.  G ran to tell me, and declared that the frog must have been playing dead.  Three minutes later, the kids were screaming again: the funeral director's little brother had stepped on and squished the frog.

Fishy

On the way to Cassie's house last Saturday, G summarized the bible stories he'd learned in VBS.  Here's his side of the conversation, to the best that I can remember: 

Jesus went in the kid's lunchbox and he got the five breads and the two fishes.  And then he split 'em up in half and they got even bigger and then he made fish sandwiches for the disciples and they all ate them.  And they had grape juice.  No, not wine.  He doesn't know how to make wine.  And then the disciples could go up in the sky...because they climbed a tree and Jesus shrunk the tree and then they could fly...oh, right, they did die like regular people.  

And they put Jesus on the cross and they put the nail clippers on him.  And then there was blood and it was a lot of blood, all the way to his legs and then all the way to his head.  They took him off and they took the nail clippers out...yeah, they wrapped him up and they put him in the cave and then they put the big stone in front.  And the blood all came out and he was a skeleton with bones.  Then he moved that big rock and he was gone.  

This is much more recollection than I ever got from B.  With B, I usually fire off a million questions and get about an answer or two.  Case in point: first day of kindergarten.  Two hundred questions, including Did you use your crayons?  Did you sit on the carpet?  Did she read you a book?  Did you look at a book?  Did you eat in the cafeteria?  Who did you sit by?  Did you look at a calendar?  Did you use construction paper?  Did you go to PE? Music?  The library?, I got: "Mom, we did a LOT of things."  Sigh.

K apparently takes after B because she was tight lipped about VBS.  She and G were in the same class, though, so with my new arsenal of bible stories, I asked her point blank about the fish.

K (swinging her leg and holding onto a dresser): There was a fish [long pause, swinging leg] and, uh, um, he diiiiied, [pause, swinging leg] and, um, God flushed it.

Sounds fishy to me.