Stop, Drop and Blog

Every day after we get home from picking up BigBrother, I look through his folder to see if he has homework, needs anything signed and to see what they did in school that he can now keep at home. Normally, I understand what the concept was behind the worksheet that they did. I mean, it’s Kindergarten. I should probably know more than a five-year-old, right?

I got stumped last week.

I stood at the table and stared at the 3×3 chart. They’ve been sorting lots of things, so I tried to figure out what the sorting method was for this particular grouping.

House, bird, cat.
Wagon, monkey, balloon.
Kangaroo, banana.

Uh, okay. Let’s see. Birds and cats can live in houses. Yeah? Monkeys… like balloons and wagons? Kangaroos eat bananas? Uhhh. I thought, for a second, that it was a color sort, but the kangaroo and banana were also white and were in their own column. Nothing rhymed. I was simply stumped.

I kept turning it over and over in my head as I got our snack together, trying to put the pieces of this mental puzzle together. I sat down plates in front of both boys and flopped myself into the chair next to BigBrother. I held up his sorted chart and pointed to it.

“Hey, Buddy. Can you tell me how you sorted these objects?”

He finished crunching up some goldfish. “We did it by how many sounds the words make.”

I blinked at him. “Oh?”

“You know, syllables.”

Not said but indicated by his tone and facial expression, “Dumbass.”

I asked him questions about syllables and we clapped out our names. He finished his snack and ran off to play with his brother while I sat at the table and stared at the worksheet. Syllables. In Kindergarten. Huh.

Thankfully, I felt a little less stupid when my Husband came home. I held up the worksheet in front of his face and asked him how they were sorted. When I finally revealed the answer, he replied the same way. “Syllables? In Kindergarten? Huh.” I did not call him a dumbass.

I think it’s great, of course, being as addicted to words as I am. Now we have another word game we can play while driving around, running errands and such. If you see BigBrother in the back of the car, clapping and counting, just know that I’m trying to prove to him that I am not, in fact, a dumbass.