it's so hot in november

The twins had their school play a few days ago, for which their classes have been practicing for about two months. The title was "Anasi and the Moss Covered Rock", a story about a sneaky spider in the African forest who finds a large rock covered in moss which looks out of place in the jungle. He discovers that if he says the phrase, "Oh my, what a strange moss covered rock" out loud then he falls asleep for an hour.

He decides to use this knowledge to lure other groups of animals in the vicinity of the rock so that they'll say the magic phrase, then when they fall asleep he runs back to their dens to steal any food they've been storing.Since the play involves 60 kids, the Anansi role became a group of 4 spiders who hatch this plot together.

Allison played a monkey, who aren't tricked by Anansi and friends but do see what goes on from the trees and try to warn the spiders to stop tricking the other animals.



Here is Allison and the other monkeys singing their song in the story, "What's that smell?" As in, what's that smell, I smell trouble. John told Allison he thought the mystery smell was the other stinky monkeys.


And the spiders trick one set of animals after another until they encounter some bush deer, of which Kate was one.

The bush deer watch the whole ordeal from the bushes and decide to trick the spiders right back by letting themselves get lured to the mystery rock but they won't say the magic phrase.


Instead they say, "Isn't that a weird moss covered rock," or "Isn't that a strange grass covered stone," and drive the spiders nuts until the spiders just tell the correct phrase, and the spiders fall asleep. Then the bush deer gather up all the stolen food and give it back to the other animals.




I'm at school every week and I've caught bits and pieces of rehearsals, and I helped with the backdrop, but I never did learn the ending of the play ahead of time. I had no idea that the bush deer were the big heroes in the story and I made a big deal about that to Kate, which I think she appreciated.

goodbye first grade

Yesterday was Erin's last day of first grade, and as you can see, she was all smiles when I picked her up. She had a great year, she really seems to like everything about school. She has many friends and is very social. She loves the after school program she attends on my workdays where she usually chooses to make art projects and write poems. Occasionally, when creative inspiration doesn't strike her I guess, she uses some time there to do her homework.

Though her school doesn't use grades and she is one of the younger kids in her class, on her final report card she "exceeds the standards" in all subjects and skills though if I had to pick her favorite class, I'd have to say art. A year of girl scouts has been completed and and she is looking forward to more. Next year will bring big changes though, as she's left the classroom and the teachers she's known for the past two years and will be in a 2/3 village.

A few days ago her school did kind of a orientation morning for all the kids like herself who will be moving up to new villages next year. All the first graders spent a morning in a 2/3 village along with the current second graders. All the third graders spent that morning in a 4/5 village with the current fourth graders, and all the fifth graders spent the morning working with Kindergartners in the K/1 villages, which is a fun mentoring opportunity that the oldest kids in the school really enjoy, I'm told. Erin was very excited about her peek into second grade life, though when I asked her what was different, she didn't offer many details.

For dinner last night, John asked the new second grader what she wanted and she requested hot dogs. Since we didn't have any John offered to go to the store. Erin asked me if we could go to a restaurant instead and I replied that we couldn't, and she said, "Well, we can PRETEND we're in a restaurant!" "Sure," I replied, as I was trying to get the dishes done. She went to her room and prepared two identical dinner menus for Kate and Allison--the front side is pictured first, and on the back of each she made a different little activity game, just like the kids' menus in a restaurant would have, she explained.


John came home and started grilling hot dogs and sausages while I prepared some side veggies. "Hey, that's not on the menu!" Erin argued, as she presented Kate and Allison with their menus at the dinner table and then read the selections to them. After their choices were made, she invited them to do the activities on the back. And we had a fine, celebratory second grade dinner.

Of course, "next year" and second grade sounds so distant, but the next school term is anything but that. She has a 6.5 week summer vacation. Erin, and the twins, will begin school again on August 6.

better late than never

Wednesday was Erin's final field trip of the year. I've been meaning to chaperone a field trip with her class for the past two years but that always involved taking a day off of work or finding childcare for the twins on one of my usual days off and neither of those things are very easy to do, generally. But when I got the notice for this trip I realized I needed to be sure to some arrangements this time.

Erin's entire village and another entire K/1 village (three classes per village, 60 kids per village) were all going to the zoo today, and there was a request for 30 chaperones, one for every 4 kids. Getting volunteers is never a problem. In fact, there were so many volunteers this time that they turned a number of them down. I suspect that I was chosen because Erin's teacher knows that I had never come along before.

My group of four included Erin, naturally, and three other first graders whom I already knew pretty well. My group, waiting to board the bus:


When we went out to the front of the school the teachers and the principal kind of gathered together and talked and no one was boarding. A few minutes later, still no one was boarding. And a few minutes after that, we were still standing there.

Apparently, two of the 5 buses reserved (a grade 2/3 village had a field trip that day too) had broken down and the replacements sent were smaller than the ones reserved, so suddenly there wasn't room for everyone. That was an interesting problem to see since the entire rest of the school district finished for the summer the previous week. There should have been plenty of buses available to fill our needs. So most of the many parents got together and carpooled in private vehicles while a few "lucky" ones like myself rode on the buses with the teachers and kids as originally planned.

I never was a bus rider to school but I did ride them on many junior high marching band trips, and lemme tell ya, nothing has changed. The vinyl seats with brown duct tape repairs, the barely functional windows, the dried gum everywhere, the smells, the drivers who look like they are on step 8 of some kind of 12 step program, the noise, the lack of adequate suspension, the rattling. In fact, I think these were the very same buses I rode on as a kid.

When we arrived at the zoo we had a special lecture with some keepers in an amphitheatre sort of place. The keepers brought out a few animals and talked and answered lots of questions.



And unlike field trips I remembered, we didn't have to shuffle around the zoo en masse with Erin's village or even with Erin's class. Instead, each chaperone took their four kids and was free to roam the zoo as they wished, catering the experience to what the kids wanted to do, stopping for lunch when and where we felt like it, since each kid brought a sack lunch and I carried them all in a backpack. That was great.

We had a map and the kids got busy studying it and off we went. "G" I'll call her, the other girl in my group, was insistent that we go see the Meercats. Okay, G, no problem, but they are all the way on the other side of the zoo and we'll get their eventually but let's work our way over there by stopping to see other things on the way, I reasoned. This satisfied her for a few minutes at a time, but that I had to repeat that logic to her at least 10 more time in the next 2 hours.

As we went from exhibit to exhibit I thought I'd try to challenge the kids:
"On what continent would we find these animals?" because on the exhibit signs they showed the native continents as an unlabeled silhouette and the specific region highlighted in red. Too obvious.
I asked them if they knew what "nocturnal" meant. They knew.
I asked about omnivores vs herbivores vs carnivores. They knew.
The characteristics of mammals? They knew.
I asked if they knew what a predator was. WAY too easy.
"Did you know that birds are closely related to dinosaurs? In fact, many scientists will say that they are dinosaurs?" Not challenging either. Okay, so, apparently, the big section they just completed in class about animals was pretty thorough. I tried.

G: "When can we see the Meercats?"


As we wandered we encountered other groups from school and the kids would quickly chat and compare notes on what had been seen, what was up ahead or what was just passed, and then my group would emerge from those conversations with a new sense of urgency to find the next cool thing that their classmates just mentioned.

Finally, yes, we made it to the Meercats, and G got Erin to pose in Meercat fashion with her for a picture.


And as anticipated as that was, after about 30 seconds G wanted to move on.

The kids had fun looking at all of the exhibits, with some more interesting than others, but nothing was so captivating to them as this:

A reptile keeper hand-feeding a monitor lizard canned monitor food (who knew there was a market for such things? But there it was, clearly labeled). The kids sat there mostly silently for nearly 15 minutes. I think I have to get one of those.

On the long bus ride home at least half the kids fell asleep, and most of them very quickly, yet the volume level didn't decrease one iota.

Can't wait to chaperone more field trips next school year, though I think I'll volunteer to drive.

school days, school plays

Last week was mighty exciting at Erin's school. One weeknight was open house for the whole school, so after dinner we all came to her class together to have her give us a tour of the latest projects. Erin had a worksheet on a clipboard with different items to be sure to point out to us, and she took that job very seriously, and checked off each item in turn.


Open house lasted an hour and I couldn't imagine that we'd need to be there that long. We arrived about 10 minutes late and we actually were kept very busy for the entire remaining time. Erin has had a productive year! I'm always amazed by the creativity in so many of her assignments, meaning, the creativity on the part of the teachers to come up with this stuff, and Erin's creativity as well. There were many more poems she'd written that I saw for the first time that night, and some wonderful artwork and story writing too.


Meanwhile, Kate and Allison noticed a friend from their preschool, the younger sibling of one of Erin's classmates, so the three of them played together for most of the time.


Erin took time to pose with her teacher, and with two of her buddies, Elvis and Brandon.

Erin always talks about Elvis and his twin brother Conner and they've been friends and classmates for two years now. I hope they are in the same village next year so they can continue to hang out together often.

Two nights later was Erin's village's spring play performance. She played a butterfly in "Rumpus in the Rainforest", a story about some frogs who lived on the rainforest floor and wanted to reach the forest canopy in order to see open sky and bask in the sunlight for the first time.


They encounter and ask for assistance from a number of other animals along their quest. The butterflies (and bats) are not some of the animals who talk with the frogs about their dilemma, but they do lead the theme song about midway through the play, and again at the end.



Parents were invited to come to school during the day and watch the dress rehearsal if we wanted, which was especially recommended if we planned on videotaping the show. Otherwise, during the evening performance, there are too many parents with too many video cameras jockeying for position in the back of the auditorium. So I took Kate and Allison and we watched the rehearsal, video camera in hand, with an audience comprised of students from several of the other classrooms.

I don't know what's up with this video. On my software it looks normal, as soon as I edit it to just the content with Erin's song, it becomes the land of short, fat people. I don't get it, an I can't seem to fix it.


Erin was very proud of her play, and I thought it was really clever, and funny.

first days

Erin started first grade last week. A very comfortable, low-key new year transition since she is in the same class with the same teacher with half of the same kids as last year. All classes at her school are grade combos so each child stays in the same room for K/1 then 2/3 and then 4/5 with the same teacher for each set of two years.

The most excitement was in meeting the 10 new kindergartners who joined her class and the fact that at morning recess the first graders get to go to the seperate, larger BIG kid playground while the kinders stay in the smaller one.


After school I interviewed her about her day and the kids apparently spent a lot of time playing a rather letterboxing-inspired sounding sort of game where they followed clues to various locations around campus in search of a gingerbread man, in order to help the kinders learn their way around school and visit key places like the office and library.


Then as I detailed in my last post, the Potty Training Fairy Godmother or something equally believable casted a spell over Kate, rendering her fit to start preschool with Allison and preserving my sanity.

Here are the girls at the front step on their first day, holding their new lunchbags:

And once inside they quickly got comfortable and dug into the dress-up outfits:

and later when I came to pick them up I could barely drag them out: