2007 October 10 | Lilac Colored Glasses

A Breakthrough mit die Schnecke

October 10th, 2007 Lilacspecs 2 comments

We’ve had a new kid in 101 these past few weeks. Actually we’ve had two but the little girl has adapted fairly well to the other kids and the classroom environment. She still has some trouble following the routine (she hasn’t been around long enough for a Pavlovian reaction to “The Cleanup Song” but we’ll break her soon…..muahahaha) and she engages in more independent and parallel play rather than group play, but when it comes to socialization 99% of our kids are highly precocious, by merit of being in daycare since they were less than 6 months old. She’s in my group and she can’t seem to remember my name so she calls me “my teacher.”

“My teacher, my teacher, guess what?”
“Can I tell you my name? It’s Korie. I’m Korie.”
“Okay my teacher, but guess what?”
And so on. But the other new kid is a little boy whose first language is German. Frankly, I don’t think anyone bothered to tell us that English is not his first language. I figured it out with a combination of hearing his mom talk to him and seeing that her e-mail address ended with .de. When this one comes into the room he immediately gets distressed; his face screws up and he runs to the little coat room area in the back of the room and he stays there alternately crying or looking like he’s about to cry. I noticed that no one really seemed to do much about this for the first week he was there so I decided to step up and try to bond with him.
In the last three weeks or so I’ve noticed that he really likes music and going outside (I’m not sure if this is because he likes going out or because he knows that’s when his mom picks him up). He also refuses to leave the coat room until it’s clean up time.

But today, on my daily visit to his closet hideout I was able to convince him to do puzzles until it was clean up time. And during music he actually requested a song! And after music he looked at me and said quietly, “Auf die playground?”

Woohoo!

Believe it or not, this is major for a kid who’d never even had a babysitter and now at 3 he’s been tossed into a bustling, loud, chaotic class full seasoned regulars. Now I have to try to brush up on my high school German so I can hopefully ease him into things better instead of talking slowly in English. And in case you are wondering, Schnecke is German for snail. This boy’s symbol at school is a spiral, but his parents have been calling it die Schnecke cause it looks like a snail shell.

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