So kids actually do things in kindergarten. They have echo owls to learn their sounds and they make apple trees with their families’ names on them. They check books out of the library that they can leave in the classroom and learn to dance “Eye of the Tiger.” The learn a poem about six little apples and the first day of fall (today!) is marked with a leaf on the calendar.
Who knew? Certainly not me.
“Wow!” I tell Pie. “That’s amazing all the things you’re doing just the second week of school. Doodles, I wonder why you didn’t have the echo owl.”
Doodles, with a mouth full of chocolate peanut butter, trying to do his math homework says, “We did.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.”
“You never mentioned it.”
He shrugs.
“You never mentioned anything.”
He shrugs again.
Pie asks, handing me a sheet, “Do echo owl for me!” Echo owl is part of the fundations program. I call out letters with specified words and the sound and she colors it on a chart she has. The idea is to have each letter associated with a word so the kids can remember what the letter sounds like. “N nut nnnnn,” I say to Pie.
She colors in the N.
“A apple ay,” I say next.
“That’s wrong,” Doodles said. “It’s A apple aaahh.”
“He’s right,” Pie says, as she colors in the A apple.
“Okay, M–”
“Mom, I’ll just do it. You’re going to do it wrong. Here, Pie, H hat hhhhh.”
I sit back and watch. I’m unneeded until I have to check Doodles’s work. He generally gets all his answers right, but I still need to check him for backwards letters and numbers.
While I’m checking, the two chat.
“I want a brother or another sister,” Doodles says.
“Me too!” Pie agrees.
“Not even the remotest chance,” I tell them.
“Why not?” Doodles asks.
“Because I am done. Done, done, done.”
“I want a brother,” Doodles says. “I know what you want,” he says to his sister. “You want a sister.”
Pie shrugs. “I don’t care. I like having a brother.”
And with that, homework time is suddenly worth it. Yea, homework time!
Echo Owl? Interesting! Yanna was playing this same game last night at dinner — F frog f-f-f-f — but the “echo owl” term hasn’t come up.
I’m sure every school–maybe even every classroom–has it’s own language, but the fundations program is used by a lot of schools. But since Pie & Doodles had the same teacher (in fact, with last year’s k-1 class, this is our third year in a row with the teacher), Doodles is well acquainted with the terminology. My favorite, though, is “E Ed eeeee.” Really, Ed? That’s the best they could come up with?
Yanna tells us they use kids’ names when there is a match, as in “Y Yanna y-y-y-y”. Maybe there is an Ed in Pie’s class?
That would be logical, wouldn’t it? But no. It’s part of the Wilson Alphabet Chart, apparently. This is it, exactly: http://www.chatham.k12.ma.us/ces/tces/gleason/fundationsabcchart.htm.