I'm currently blogging through the years, reminiscing on my childhood. Check out my first blog about
pre-school!
- My teacher was a nice, older lady. I loved her and she's really the quintessential kindergarten teacher. She would carry around a white envelope with her every day where she would write down names of the kids who were behaving "badly." If you got your name on her envelope 3 times, your name would go up on the blackboard and you lost out on treasure box. I got my name on her envelope once the entire year. And it was the absolutely worst thing that ever happened to six-year-old me. I was playing in Housekeeping and wasn't sharing so one of my friends told on me. Obviously, this experience scarred me!
- I have this memory of sitting with all the other kindergartners in the kindergarten pod, singing songs during a rainy Friday afternoon. I'm not sure if we did this frequently because I only remember doing it once.
- Like most kindergarten classes, we had circle time in the morning. And we would often talk about our weekends on Mondays. One Monday, a girl told a story about going camping with her parents and sister. Her sister got a blood-sucking fly stuck in her eye and her father managed to get it out of her eye. If he hadn't, the fly would've sucked all the blood out of her body and she would've died. (Yes, this story was told to five- and six-year-olds...) It scared me to death and I'm still scared of this happening to me! Irrational? Perhaps.
- My best friend in kindergarten was "Lauren with the blue truck." (A different Lauren than the one in pre-school.) She had a really cool mom and an awesome blue truck. She was one of those really cool kids who became my friend and made me cool because she was my friend. In January, though, she had suddenly disappeared and I never heard from her again.
- I have a lovely memory of my dad driving my brother and me to school and him yelling at me because I didn't know how to tie my shoes. Instead of showing me, he just yelled at how stupid I was and made me cry the whole way there. Great guy.
- My mom would usually take my brother and me to her work (my old pre-school) before we started school. So I would spend my mornings in my mom's classroom. Everytime a parent came up to me and asked what grade I was in, I would always respond, "I'm not in a grade. I'm in kindergarten."
- For the holidays, we made big trash bag pumpkins and snowmen. Everyone got a chance to scrunch up newspaper and stuff a big orange or white trash bag that would eventually plump up to be a pumpkin or snowman! It was so much fun!
- I was placed in a remedial reading class in kindergarten. When my mom got a letter from my school, she thought the school was telling her what a genius I was! The truth is, I was incredibly shy and didn't talk much. They assumed I had trouble reading so I had to go to this class during nap time for an hour. I don't remember how long I was in the class but I was pulled out when they realized their mistake. I'm still upset over losing my nap time.
- Every Friday, we got to choose from the Treasure Box. (Provided we didn't have our name on the blackboard!) Once, I got to choose two toys from the Treasure Box because the Friday before that, I left school early. My classmates were so jealous of me. It felt wonderful!
- We had one student who was a big disruption. My teacher kept moving him to different seats but he was always causing problems. So she finally moved him to his own seat and then had to put a cardboard box around his desk. I didn't find it weird at the time and just felt bad for him. He also frequently ate paper.
