Kindergarten Moment

My job as a kindergarten teacher results in some very busy moments, very stressful times and rewarding feelings of accomplishment. But one of my favorite perks of the job is the "little funnies" my kids provide me with on a daily basis. This is a brief story about one of those such moments that reminds me why I love my job so much...

I was working with a small group of boys and girls at a table in my classroom. We were playing a word game where the students took turns rolling a die on a gameboard. On the various faces of the die, there were a variety of letters. The gameboard was divided into squares and in each square was a word ending. For example, some of the endings were -ed, -at, -ight, etc. Once a student rolled the die on the board, they had to check to see if the beginning letter they rolled would make a word if it was paired with the ending it landed on. One example might be rolling the letter R and combining it with the ending -ed to make the word "Red". Needless to say, my students are still learning how to read, so identifying real words versus pretend words is a little difficult for them to do independently. The game comes with a big "key card" that has every possible real word combination typed on it. When the students are unsure if they have made a "real" word, they are to check the key card and see if that word is included. If it is a word, they get a point. If it isn't a word, they pass the die to the next person.

So, one of the little boys in my group rolled the letter "L". It landed on the ending -ake. He was unsure whether or not the word "lake" was a real word (as he was an ESOL student), so we grabbed the key card to check his word. As he's searching the card for his word, he is talking aloud to himself. All of a sudden, another little boy in my group starts going "awwwwwwww, awwwwww", not as in "that's so cute aw" but as in you're in trouble "awwww". I turn to him and ask him what the problem is and he begins insisting that the little boy looking up the word lake is saying something bad. So I'm sitting there, trying to figure out what the boy who is talking to himself during his word search is saying to see if it was inappropriate language when the other student continues his "awwwww". I listened to the boy searching and heard nothing inappropriate, so I asked the tattling boy what he had heard and he said very loudly so the entire class could hear, "HE SAID WHAT IN THE HELL!" The boy who was searching for his word and is being accused of saying bad things turns to me with this shocked look and says, "Ms. McDonald, where is the L?"

I burst out laughing because this sweet little 5 year old was simply muttering to himself "where is the L, where is the L?" during his search for the beginning letter of the word lake and his classmate heard an entirely different thing!

Gotta love those kindergartners :)