Chalk and Cheese Chronicles

Meeting the World in Fourth Grade

The following post was inspired by the book Close Encounters of the Third Grade Kind by Phillip Done. Mr. Done is certainly the type of teacher whom some of his students will never forget. We can all scan through the list of our grade school teachers and pick the one who made the greatest impression on our young selves. For me, it's a teacher who once invited our entire fourth grade class over for a swim in her condominium pool!

I still have her letters. One is typewritten. A few are handwritten in her familiar cursive. Another is addressed to me in the bold lettering of calligraphy.

She was my fourth grade teacher and when she left our school to get married and move to Honolulu, she and I kept in touch for several years. As Ms. Kirby became Mrs. Izumi, I followed her trail through letters to a world bigger than my own. She wrote to me about her travels to Fiji and Guadalajara and about her life in Hawaii with her new husband, a lawyer.

In her classroom, she brought the world to us. We spent a lot of time talking about different countries. I spent a lot of time with my nose in encyclopedias, turning to the page of the country we were studying, finding the big map (Kenya!) and then tracing its outline onto tracing paper for my book reports. I loved doing those reports. Back in the classroom, the posters would change from Africa to Mexico to Japan. We watched many films about various countries, following the narrator into homes of the world. Our classroom felt like a museum.

Boys Will be Boys

I am the mother of boys. I'm trying to raise them as globally minded citizens of the world who appreciate the pine needles they're standing on. Smell the pine needle, feel it, remember this moment, this tree, this adventure. Look at a map. Look for the treasure, run barefoot in the sand. Here's another map, find yourself on the map, find Paris, find Portland. Look, feel, smell - use all your senses. Take it in. Notice things. Ask questions, seek answers. See that person - he has a history. Run into the world, feel the wind. Read.

My boys are marvelous creatures. Working within my limited means (read: money!), I'm trying to give them the tools they need to seek their places in this big world. Which is why we're always on the go, why I'm always giving them teaching moments, why we're always looking, smelling, and eating up the world. They climb, they play, they imagine and slowly, they understand just a little bit more.

I won't keep my kids in the dark, sheltered in the living room, eyes glued to the television.

Inside, I celebrate my boys and the beautiful human beings they've become and yet, I have an uneasy feeling that society does not celebrate boys in early childhood. While I have no doubt that my boys' talents and abilities will take them far later on in life, society does not seem to celebrate the accomplishments of boys when boys are young. In kindergarten, for instance, there is great emphasis on fine motor perfection. Can you write your name in deneliean, dear block letter boys? In my experience, girls seem to favor fine motor activities. I was one of those little girls. I'd spend hours, in fact, I preferred to spend hours in my room coloring and drawing and writing letters over going outside. My brother, on the other hand, was always and I mean always, outside playing. Who would have had the advantage in kindergarten? Why me, of course. I think it skews parents' perceptions of how well their children are doing in school. Parents of girls get to coast with pride over their daughter's accomplishments, while boys who are accomplished at so many different things, get overlooked, their kindergarten experiences soured by the emphasis on fine motor perfection.

I Will Separate My Twins in Kindergarten

Is Separating Twins Really the Answer? @ Yahoo! Video

I should have seen it coming that day when I watched the grainy screen at one of those early ultrasounds. My boys, still in in utero, floating in a silent space and then, suddenly...KICK...HIT...WHACK. I had a ringside seat to a fetus fight. My husband and I laughed but it certainly was alarming to see our tiny babies go at it like that. Couldn't they just put webbed fingers together and somehow hold hands?

Everything was going so well until this past year at preschool when one was asked to go on a play date and not the other. It was a miserable FAIL. I'm well aware of the benefits of separate play dates and I embrace them, but with my competitive two, one social and one tentative, it doesn't work just yet. The repercussions are brutal, with one twin suffering beyond just tears as a result.

My boys are best friends, but they do fight. They are competitive. They spend so much time together, that they need a breather, they need a chance for each to develop his own set of friends. They are fiercely independent, always fine on their own without each other, without me. But they also thrive on the bond they share. They share laughter and love, but they need a chance to develop into their own persons.

When my boys go off to kindergarten, I'll be separating them. I know it's the best thing for them, for their classroom, for their teacher, and for our family.

Original post to Chalk and Cheese Chronicles.

Video originally from this post on Silicon Valley Moms.

Book Club Read: 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny

I gave my boys' preschool teacher the book, 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny, as a gift for the holidays. Although taking charge of a bunch of preschoolers at first seems vastly different from a class of third graders, it's really not. Teacher moments happen every day, at every grade level, at every school. Author Philip Done devotes a chapter (an essay)  to "Garage Sales" in which he describes how a little browsing about a garage sale can quickly escalate into a heated competition over a game of Chutes and Ladders the moment another teacher arrives on the scene. Fortunately for Mr. Done, he hasn't bumped into our Ms. R, preschool teacher and garage saler extraordinaire. You should see the garage sale finds which fill her classroom! Last week, the kids played happily with a big red wooden barn, a garage sale treasure, of course. Ms. R would give Mr. Done a run for his garage sale money, for sure. So I gave Ms. R a copy of 32 Third Graders (and no, I didn't find it at a garage sale) and she loved it through and through.

I, too, had laughed my way through the book. I read it via the eyes of my former third grade self. I read it via the perspective of a mom to future third graders. I read it as a wannabe teacher and I read it as someone who just enjoys a good laugh. What a fun read! I wanted to turn back the clocks and have Mr. Done be my third grade teacher. I wanted to race ahead and pre-register my 4-year-olds for Mr. Done's third grade class. I wanted to clear my schedule and head to teacher school. I wanted to laugh.

Kindergarten (Un)Readiness

When I was 5 years old, my mother enrolled me in kindergarten at our neighborhood school. I'm sure she didn't poll her friends to see if they'd be enrolling their age eligible kids in kindergarten because for the most part, she already knew. Most of her friends were also enrolling their children in kindergarten at their neighborhood public school. If we were age eligible, we went. It's just how it was done back then, at least in our middle class California neighborhood. Sure, a few went the private school route and a few more enlightened parents held their autumn birthday children (especially boys) back a year; but in doing so, they didn't conduct a massive search to find the "perfect" kinder prep program in the frenzied manner we do today. In fact, the children I know who sat out that first year, did most of the sitting out at home, playing with their siblings. Had I been born an October baby, I'm quite certain my parents would have enrolled me in kindergarten nonetheless and off to kindergarten I might have marched, a shy 4-year-old who might not have been quite ready.