Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Run, Run, As Fast As You Can...

Kindergarten Update:

Dawson is in loooooove. With his teacher, with his 'new friends' and with the entire experience thus far. He comes home every day with a stack of neatly organized paperwork with little smiley faces on all his 'hard days work.' He is a cutting, gluing, coloring crayoning wonder, and I'm loving every moment of being here when he walks thru the door and talks my ears off about the magic of his day.

It only fueled his kindergarten torch of passion when his teacher selected HIS NAME out of her magic SuperStar of the Week raffle ball. He was the very first one of the year, and thought he was just made to be important all week as he lead lines, wore his royal crown and used his magic superstar wand as the center of attention on the special SuperStar wall where he shared photographs to his captive audience of royal subjects.



To put the whole experience thus far completely over-the-top, his amazing teacher has a long running tradition of the second week of school being 'gingerbread week.' We had heard of the legacy from a few kindergarten veterans around the 'hood,' but of course nothing could come close to describing the anticipation of gingerbread Friday last week.

They spent all week talking about all things gingerbread... the teacher brought in pictures of gingerbread houses, told them all the story of the gingerbread man, taught them the song, etc.

This was all leading up to gingerbread Friday, when the kids and the teacher all made a giant batch of gingerbread, then cut out a ginger man and left him to bake in the oven. But... whats this?! When they go back to retrieve their new delicious friend... HE HAS RUN AWAY! and left a trail of flour all thru the school that all 30 kindergartners must follow to try to track him down.

OH! The adventure! The SUSPENSE! The sights of the schoolyard yet unseen to be discovered! I heard about the excitement and then tragedy of it all, when all they find at the end of the flour trail after tens of minutes searching far and wide is a note from that rascally ginger man saying (Dawson translated): "Some ginger breads LIKE to be eaten... AND SOME DON'T. I don't LIKE to be eaten, so I ran away."



EVERY kid emerged from the classroom that day telling the EXACT same story at the TOP of their lungs at varying pitches and speeds and volume levels (gahhhh! mass chaos!), and ALL of them wore the same sugar crazed expression:




Apparently in the end, the vanishing act wasn't a TOTAL bust, because The Runaway left enough cookies that 'liked to be eaten' to share with all the friends. The lovely teacher then unleashed the masses to the waiting parents looking rather smug and proudly announced that 'now that the children were as high as kites on a sugar rush, she was sending them all home for the afternoon.'

To sum up: We heart kindergarten. And long live the gingerbread man!

2 comments:

Beatrice Blount said...

Clearly we need to go back to kindergarten. This sounds much better than answering phones.

lucinda! said...

oh man! awesome teacher!!! the gingerbread story made me giddy, love it.