My Morning in Kindergarten

It was a pretty uneventful morning. Before we left, Joel was beside himself with excitement and anticipation. After getting myself ready, I decided to play the game and went downstairs to see if my outfit met his approval (as if I would change anyway). “How’s this Joel?” His whole face lit up with sheer appreciation of what I was doing to ‘impress’ him, making him feel special. After all, this was for him, for us. It was our morning together, essentially a date.

We got to the class just as the bell was ringing so my first order of business was to help several little 5-yr-olds get de-shoed and re-shoed. One boy spent a good 10 minutes searching for the shoes that were right in front of him. Good thing volunteer Leslie came by and pointed them out.

The kids filed in, one after the other doing their morning routine like second nature. They found their attendance cards, put their agendas where they needed to go and went to the carpet with their books. As they were doing their thing keeping themselves busy I was given the task of sharpening all the pencils and pencil-crayons. I was using one of those tiny hand held plastic sharpeners and the leads continued to break off and get stuck in blades. I looked up at the clock, then looked at the three cups of pencil-crayons left….”this is going to be long morning” I thought.

Thankfully the kids kept me involved. One little girl came up to me and said, “nothing is going right for me today at school.” I couldn’t help but smile, it’s been 20 mins and it’s kindergarten! “so and so has a crush on me and he is so annoying!” Oh the drama!

The morning progressed. We had a guest reader come in. He was a manager at Starbucks and read us a couple of stories. Then we went outside for recess. It was cold, very, very cold (And there I was in a flippin' skirt!!!). When we came in I helped some kids print in their agendas and then went over their home reading with them.

As I was going over their reading, they were playing in their centers. The one next to me was the house center where all the girls congregated. They were setting the table and cooking food and preparing their ‘restaurant’ for the teacher to come over. When everything was in order they had her come and sit at the table. They gave her a menu to look over. She invited Joel and a couple other boys to come with her. At first Joel was hesitant about entering the house center, but eventually he did and had a great time. After talking about some good things to eat the teacher says, “I’ll have some tea please” Joel ponders that thought and says, “yeah that sounds good I’ll have tea too.” The make-believe waitress turned to go get the tea- pot and Joel calls out, “Make it a decaf.” The teacher and I had a good chuckle. Five-year-olds are great!

Before long it was time to clean up and go home. Good times.