jennanddave.com

They really put kids on the fast track in Kindergarten. Henry's learning things that I know I didn't learn myself until much later. He knows what a trapezoid is, and it is now his favorite shape. He's working out addition and subtraction, which I'm not sure they're officially teaching yet, but they have been actively laying a heavy foundation that has led to him internalizing all sorts of math...well...stuff, the natural conclusion of which, for him, has been addition and subtraction. Then there's "language arts". Ahhh, language arts. He's being stubborn about confessing what words he knows. He refuses to read anything that hasn't officially been taught to him from the list of high frequency words his teacher is working their way through. This many weeks into the year, though, the list of words he knows has become rather long, and it's only a matter of time before he doesn't remember which words he's been taught and which he's taught to himself. Once that happens, I'll do a big happy dance and Henry will be blazing through the books we read at night. In the meantime, one of the things he likes to do is practice writing sentences on my computer. At school they've been working on punctuation marks a bit, and he's been taking a few out for a test drive. This past weekend, this is what he came up with:

They remind me of a philosophizing Hemingway. Short and sweet, slightly existential. He was very pleased with the end result. (For the record, four of the words he typed out in those sentences are words he would refuse to read in a book.)

Yesterday when I was helping out with the gingerbread houses, one of the other mom's told me that her daughter came home from school a few weeks ago and was talking about Henry. She said he's a little loopy, that sometimes when they're walking to another activity, for instance gym or art, Henry will forget where they're going and start wandering off in another direction and the class has to call him back and remind him where they're headed. When I told Dave that story, we both agreed that it epitomizes Henry. That's my boy.