He didn’t want to wake up. I started waking him up about 7:20, then gave up and lay with him for a few minutes. Finally brought him down 7:45. Still no talking for a few minutes, although he ate his vitamins. He watched one Ollie and Moon, then we hurried off to school, taking the car.
I got there and volunteered first thing in the morning this time. Didn’t have much luck getting Emmitt interested in drawing a picture for the page, but August drew a picture of tea spilling everywhere: “The pink and the green is the persons, and the orange is the tea, okay?” I then helped Nicholas make a train, helping hold the paper so he could cut the pieces apart, then cut the tape to tape it together. Meanwhile, August was making big sculptures out of pieces of wood. I volunteered until after 9:30. They were having a late morning meeting. When August saw the schedule today he said “That’s easy!” Then he was getting to ring the bell for morning meeting and was just fine with me saying goodbye.
I drove the car home and worked and had lunch, then drove back. When I picked him up at one he was lying on the floor, resting: “not on a bed…the morning meeting rug.” As we left he said to Anna “Have a good rest time!”
I asked what the highlights of the day were, and he first said me picking him up. Then “Having you stay here for a little while to help with the tea party book…Why you always help with the tea party book? Cuz me and Emmitt couldn’t do it by ourselves?”
We sat outside library. He said they read Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You See? in Creative Movement class and acted it out. Then said “We did mindfulness and yoga with Ms. Stacy.” with a grin on his face. When I said I could message Ms. Anna and ask if that was true he said “No! Don’t do it!” As he snacked on his cheerios he asked a bunch of questions, like
– where are all the 4th graders?
– what does Mike do?
– what’s ‘k’ (sound)? What’s ‘sh’?
He was being totally social. He told the Shery, the ELL teacher, all about how he likes dry Cheerios and his other favorites snacks and sweet things like honey and brown sugar and white sugar.
Then he saw Mike and asked “Have you ever seen that elephant?…You know, the one you told me about…” “I think it was actually a joke!” They talked for a good minute. After Mike left he said “I don’t like Mike cuz he’s a government. A bad government that tells people what to do.” Later I would tell Carly it was her fault that he doesn’t like government, as she taught him about government. But then I realized I’d told him about Star Wars yesterday and this comes from my description of the Empire.
He also talked about “Dextra…he’s in 4th grade…he lives across the street from us. I seen him walk by. I say ‘hello, Dextra!…like juhyeok cuz he sometimes gets mad.” We then went in the library and I downloaded a few reading/word apps since he’s interested in letter sounds again. He played some Endless Wordplay and Intro to Words, then started some art. Ms. Amelia came by and we talked to her. He told her he was doing “two letter games and art game.” I asked if she also goes by Ms. H. She does not, and doesn’t know who that is. So still don’t know who Ms. H is, who August has talked about several times. In art I asked if he’d like to write some words for the tea party book: “No. We’ll do the dots game. I’ll do the dots and you connect them.” We talked about the symbiotic relationship of squirrels and trees, as squirrels spread the seeds.
We then walked over to coding class. It was the last session, so at the end he got a certificate. Later in the evening Carly was talking about how she was told that certificates are really a big thing in Israel. I got this one out and showed her. He had fun in class and let me sit outside and work. He spilled his granola and I went in and helped clean it up. Then he spilled it again.
After class we went down and he played with the ball and tube thing with the pieces that connect to the wall magnetically. We were playing with that and had a pretty good path going when Carly showed up. We stayed a few more minutes, then he was rather disappointed when we wouldn’t go back to Carly’s classroom to play there. I reminded him of the pomegranate lollipop, the second of the two that Israel Cassie had given us yesterday, and he was happy with that. Gave it to him when we left on his bike at 4:15. Ate it faster though, as it only lasted half the way home. He said it was because he liked it more than the peach one.
At home I got ingredients out and we started making the Logan bread. He was helpful throughout, and got to try the ingredients. First time using molasses, and he said it tasted like “metal balls”. I let him lick out the measuring cup that we’d used for honey, and he joked “Someone’s been licking honey.”
He talked about how he is a robot kid and asked “You think there’s any other robot persons out there? I don’t think so, on the Earth. I’m pretty special, right?”
He ate two hard boiled eggs for dinner “Where’s the smoke?” He meant the yolk, but that started us discussing smokyy eggs and Korea. He pretended we were in Korea: “Let’s go somewhere on the U-Line!” He was asking where we would go in Korea, and I said if we had one day we could go to Children’s Grand Park, but if we had two then we could go north as well. He said we’d have at least 3 days, so we started planning our Korea vacation.
We were then over in the kitchen, and he was playing with tape. He had already realized that if you get flour on the tape it isn’t sticky. But he discovered that if he put the tape in water it would start sticking again. he was excited about his discovery and told us all about it a few times: “I was doing a science experiment with tape and flour and water to see if it would stick…and the water wins to stick it with surface tension.” He then had fun pulling the sofa bed out, three or four times. He would pull it out on his own, then ask me to put it back and then do it again. We talked more about symbiotic relationships (bees and flowers). He then showed me lion, tree, and cobra poses from yoga class.
Took him up for his bath. Figured out that Dextra is from Hilo (Dexter). Played for awhile, and we realized that the pink clay he had gotten with Carly was some sort of magic clay that was still soft, even though it hasn’t been in a bag or anything for weeks.
Downstairs he shared the bread and milk with mama. I asked if he wanted to share some of the bread with PKB and he liked the idea. He was then a student from Carly’s class. He said his name was ‘Wizabel’. Carly went up for a shower and we watched the Hebrew numbers 1 to 100 video. He said the girl at 17 looked like mama again, and he said another girl looked like Bat-Chen. He spotted a Brave Wilderness episode, and we watched the whole 22 minute episode on warrior wasps. A very suspenseful one and we learned a lot.
Went upstairs with Carly. He wa upset we hadn’t read. I left them 8:40 or so. She was going to read to him – Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, I think. Took quite awhile. She said the only true thing he would tell her about school was about me volunteering. Everything else involved him being the size of an atom and sneaking around the school.
He told me nobody played with him outside now. The teachers haven’t been giving him challenges, and he doesn’t like the chasing games. Also talked about couple of other kids not being friends with each other for awhile, or the rest of the day, and he was wondering why. He said he hasn’t done that.