"Nous allons chanter Dan le Ciel," wrote Nate, "pour French Day."
"What does that mean???" I asked breathlessly.
"It means," Nate explained patiently, "We are going to sing 'Dan le Ciel' for French Day."
I kid you not, the capitalization was even correct. This is a guy who had never met a lowercase letter that he wanted to attempt to write until a few months ago, who had never noticed the existence of punctuation, who spoke no more French than you or I (or possibly just I). I am blown away by kindergarten. Blown away! These days, he knows where his food goes after it leaves his plate ("I have something stuck in my esophagus!" his friend Gracie recently exclaimed to her mom), he can describe the duties of a dozen career People in His Neighborhood, and, when given a topic sentence such as "Brr! It's cold!" he can write an entire essay as follows: "Brr! Its cold When its cold I put on a warm coat. the cold week is this week. it is chily out. yesterday & [yes, ampersand! he learned how to make an ampersand!] Today. I dont like it is cold. I did not like it about 1,000,000 times. I do like warm on sunny days"
Seriously, about all I remember from kindergarten is show and tell and playing with blocks. I can't even believe what they have 5 year olds doing these days. But I am impressed. And most of all, I'm excited that Nate, a loather of preschool, is so into everything that they're doing in school. He plays Duck Duck Goose! He does science experiments! He grudgingly draws stick people in art class! He's even started to be more interested in the content of the stories he hears than the number of the page he is on. I've always found Nate endlessly entertaining, but I am really enjoying the Enthusiastic Kindergartn Participant model.
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