Surfing the Inner N8

Little kids just don’t seem that impressed with learning the Hebrew origins of their names.

Today there was a little girl named Sarah sitting on the swings.  I asked her, “Did you know that the name ‘Sarah’ means ‘princess’?”

She looked at me blankly for a second and replied, “I’m wearing gloves!”

Needless to say, I didn’t delve into Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc.  Maybe next year.

I knew I was forgetting something from that lunch with second-graders yesterday:

When I asked the kids what they’d been doing in class that morning, they said they were learning about compound words.  So I asked what compound words they’d learned.

One little guy said: “Doghouse…  newspaper… mailbox… people.”

I thought, Huh?  “People”?  But if you say it out loud, it does sound kind of like a compound word.

Today I had lunch with some second-graders.  A couple conversational highlights:

“On the first day of first grade I didn’t say anything for a month.”

“I can spell ‘minute’ without even thinking about it.”
“Okay, go for it.”
“M-i-n-u-t-e.”
“Did you think about it?”
“Only the ‘t-e’ part.”

Conversation overheard on the Training Station playground yesterday:

Ms. Sharon, looking at toy with little plastic piece broken off of it: That’s okay, we can fix it with duct tape.

Three-year-old girl: Eeeeewwwwww!!!!  Duck tape!

Yesterday on the playground I found a dead, dried out bug in a spider’s web on the playground at the preschool.  There was a four-year-old girl standing there, so I asked her if she knew what happens to a bug that gets caught in a spider web.  She shook her head, so I told her that the spider eats the bug’s guts.

Her eyes got wide and she looked at me, impressed, and said, “How do grownups know so much?”

Kids are great.  Yesterday morning at the Training Station, Ms. Grace led the first Bible Story time for the new school year.  A couple highlights:

Ms. Grace: Today I’m going to tell you the story about how God made the world.
Three-year-old boy: ‘Cause He’s magic!

Ms. Grace (near end of Bible Story time): Okay kids, we’re going to do one more song…
Four-year-old boy (doing motions with his hands): “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”?

The kids had fun, but I think the highlight for them was when the trash truck came by and they watched through the window as it emptied our dumpster.  They were pretty excited about that.

This morning the Pre-K class from the Training Station went on a field trip to Assateague.  When they got back I was talking with some of the kids about what they saw there.  (One little boy’s shirt was soaking wet.  When I asked him why his shirt was so wet, he grinned and said proudly, “I touched a fish!”  I decided not to pursue that one.)  When I asked if they saw any ponies, one of the girls said, “No, but we saw that kind of horse that swims in the water.  What’s it called?”

Since they have wild ponies at Assateague that like to swim in the ocean waves, I asked her, “A wild horse?”

She said, “No.”

“A swimming horse?”

“No.”

“A shark horse?”

“No.”

“A whale horse?”

“No.”

“A turtle horse?”

“No.”

“A fish horse?”

“No.”

“A dolphin horse?”

“No!” she said.  “None of those kinds of horse is real.  It was one of those little baby kinds.”

“An ocean horse?”

Apparently that jogged her memory.  “No!” she exclaimed.  “A seahorse!!!”

Carolyn’s last day of work is a week from this Friday.  Yesterday one of her students asked her, “Mrs. Hyde, when is your party?”

“What party?  I’m not having a party,” she answered.

To which another kid interjected, “Uh-huh, your surprise party.”

Carolyn was reading a science book about animals to her kindergarten class yesterday.  She showed them a picture that looked something like this:

When she asked if anyone knew what this was, one little guy raised his hand and said: “It’s a playing mantis!”