payment plans

My morning:

A girl play acted talking on her phone. Not super unusual, but at one point she "got a call" from her husband. She looked at me and said, "Ugh, my husband is on the other line. Can you hold on for a second?" The girl then walked to a different part of the empty room and stood over there, having a pretend argument (with a lot of attitude) with her pretend husband. Sometimes the way children play astounds me. This is learned behavior and I'm saddened that a 4 year old thinks playing includes fighting with yoru husband on the phone. She also said something about someone being on the line for a payment plan. Kids don't make up these phrases by themselves; they learn them somewhere.

Some of my kids learned "holy shit." As in "Holy shit, I found a card!" I think it's pretty funny but obviously can't show them that. I just ignore it because making a big deal out of it will make it ... well, a big deal. But inwardly I giggle.

My boy who chooses not to speak at school mouthed the word "fall" while we were walking down the steps. I put rhyming words on the stairs so they can step on the rhyme and say it at the same time, which is good reinforcement. Then as we were walking down the hall, he said a few things (which, sadly, I couldn't quite make out) but I knew they were words. It figures he chooses to speak during times when it's loud and you can't quite hear him. He also mouthed "good night" to me as I was covering him up for nap. I'm so close to getting this kid to talk... just a little bit more. I think the biggest deterrant is the other teachers. They make a big deal out of it and send the kid back into his nonverbal shell. He's not going to start talking because he was harassed into it.

I've been doing round 2 of the official benchmarking for kindergarten. Over all the kids have made some great progress - 4 kids weren't getting rhyming enough to even be able to score on the rhyming test in the fall; now all of them have moved beyond that and one girl even scored on target for kindergarten (she moved from none to 12). Letter naming has generally gone up as well; one girl scored 20 in the fall and 10 in the winter, but I think it's not that she stopped learning, just that the test is boring her. We'll see how the rest of them go. I'd like to recommend some changes for the classroom I work in for the next few months, mostly in terms of letter knowledge.

I'm going to be busy for the next few weekends: Erich and Katie come to visit this weeked; I go to Green Bay next weekend; Mom and Harry visit the weekend after that for my birthday. There will probably be some pictures at some point in the future... or not. It'll just be pictures of food.