Half Of What You Hear

I heard a fellow teacher once say "I promise to only believe half of what your child tells me about your homelife, if you promise to only believe half the things you hear about the school day!" I think it's a fairly common saying and it definitely holds true for anybody who works with kids. I'm pretty sure that when parents ask what they did today at school, they get whichever movie the kids watched while I made lunch, and maybe what they ate for lunch if it was something they liked. Of course, we do far more than that in the span of a day, and we hear all kinds of interesting things here too. :)

• I'm on the verge of asking one family if there's an announcement I don't know about due to multiple references to "baby my house".
• One tells me, "I'm broke. That means I have no money. Like my daddy."
• "Can you show my mommy how to make this food? She doesn't cook for me."
  
• In the mammal questioning I'm told a cheetah is a "girl", which leads to a muttered discussion between me and Kanga regarding whether it could possibly mean this or even this, and if those things could have been have overheard from tv. We have to amuse ourselves with grownup conversation somehow. :)
• "I can't clean up today. My head hurts..."
  
• During orca work this morning the orca was compared to someone's grandmother.
  

If you want to ask a few more leading questions of your toddler/preschooler and see if they remember what we're actually doing lately:

• Letter focus on Q and W. Q is "circle with a tail, for Queen and Quack" and we've been practicing reading, recognizing, writing, and sounding it out.
• Mammal discussion continues all month. Major concepts we're learning that characterize a mammal: They have a backbone. They have to breathe air. Baby mammals drink milk with their mommies. They have hair or fur. We're doing a lot of questioning about whether or not something is a mammal. Is Thomas the Train a mammal? Does he drink milk? etc...
• So far we've studied chimp, human, opossum, cheetah, seal, and orca.