April & May: The field trip chaperone reigns
Perk #22 of being an accidental stay at home mom? Chaperoning field trips.
Taking a day off work to get on a school bus and was just not something I could have done when I was working a full-time job; when C was in nursery school I had to back out of a field trip to the circus at the last minute and it left an open wound. So now that I have no full-time job, I’m all, I’ll never, well, almost never, miss an opportunity to proctor 25 screaming children to the destination of the school’s choice.
Tuesday, April 21: The zoo. Field trip went like this: Parents (mostly moms) milled around school for 30 minutes as we waited for children. Children appeared wearing their designated field trip hats. Have I mentioned the lice that’s been making the rounds at school? Bus ride was filled with screaming children. Once at zoo, children got brief explanation of carnivores, omnivores and herbivores from an overly-smiley zoo educator who maybe also appeared not-so-secretly resentful that she’d pursued some sort of advanced degree in science only now to be spending her day telling kindergartners to sit on their bottoms. Children answered zoo educator’s canned questions regarding snakes and worms and one child (not mine) gave shockingly well-informed answer about how snakes kill their prey. Children fed sweet potato to meal worms and caressed snake. Children took bathroom break and yours truly entrusted three boys to use the men’s room on their own and then found yours truly entering the men’s room to yell at one boy, and then another boy, for entering the bathroom stall of another boy and disrupting his vital business. Children watched sea lions, dangling dangerously close to their waters. Children visited petting zoo, fed pellets of food to goats and then looked at baboons and turtles.
The trip ended on a bit of a sad note for me as C, who is sort of allergic to the world, wound up with a giant hive on his face and a sneeze-filled, energy-sapping allergic attack, probably from feeding the farm animals. (I guess if you are allergic to dogs and cats you might as well be allergic to goats too?) I spent most of the rest of the trip comforting C, who lost his enthusiasm to run through the prairie dogs’ area and play on the fake lily pads. In a matter of moments, he melted from an overly-energetic menace to a sad, needy little boy; I felt so lucky I could be with him.
Tuesday, April 28: The gym. I decide to help out while the school’s kindergarten and first grade classes visited a local community center gym so they could do what kids in the suburbs get to do every day: run around a track, do an obstacle course, learn some stretching and dribble a basketball. The kids were on shockingly good behavior; everyone looked happy, and, unlike the chaos I often see when I stop in at C’s classroom for family Friday, I didn’t witness a single fight or set of tears. Conclusion: school at this age should be more about jumping through obstacle courses than learning to read.
Thursday, May 7: The playground. C’s kindergarten class is starting a new social studies unit on playgrounds. I actually didn’t know they even did social studies in kindergarten. I’m not sure C did, either. The class is kicking off the unit with a trip to the nearby playground. It is a beautiful, stunning, sunny day and C’s teacher lets them run loose for a long time; no one, especially not even Mrs. B, is interested in a long lesson on this kind of day. The kids play many different iterations of tag and the moms chat with each other and Mrs. B and we’re all pretty much just having social hour during the school day, right as it should be. There’s a short lesson about playgrounds; I miss it because I’m shepherding a hurt kid back to school. By the end of the trip, everyone is pretty ready to go back, and I’ve concluded a few more things about kindergartners.
They still play the same games we did; how does that happen? Did no one invent a better game of tag in 30 years?
Some kids cry when they are out of place in line; social friction seems mostly to do with the upset of order.
A lot of kids (including my own) pick their noses. And maybe eat it. Is there an evolutionary explanation for this?
Everyone wants to be the boss of everyone else, except for some kids who are bossed on but don’t even seem to notice so I’m not sure it actually counts.
Everybody else’s lunch looks better than your own, but whatever you have is seriously still worth bragging about.