Mommy Helper

Yesterday I had my first opportunity to be the "class mom" for the morning at Charley's preschool. How this works is that there is a permanent teacher in the room, with approximately 12 children in the class, and each child's mom/dad sign up for two days each semester to help with the class. This not only helps keep the cost of the preschool down, but it also gives the parents a chance to be involved in the classroom more.

When a child's mom or dad comes to help for the day, that means that it is that child's "special day." On this special day, the child gets to brings snacks for the class, feed the class fish, tell the class which day of the month it is, report the weather outside, act as line leader when going in and out of the classroom, and erase the board at the end of the day (which is exciting for some reason). As I mentioned, Charley was most looking forward to the part where she got to feed the fish. Apparently, according to her teacher, feeding the fish is a class favorite.

So we arrived at school a little early to help set up the classroom, and once everyone arrived, we began the day with some carpet time where the kids sang songs, talked about what day it was, and worked on the letters A-D. During this time, Charley came over to my lap and sat down in it, which I guess is pretty common for the kids to do when their mom or dad is in class. The teacher was right in the middle of showing the kids something, and during a two second pause, Charley yelled really loud,

"Mom, the hair on your legs is really poking me and it hurts!"

Her teacher just smiled at me with that knowing look (that three-year-olds often say embarrassing things) and moved on with her activity. Thank goodness the rest of the audience was just a bunch of oblivious kids because otherwise I might have been really embarrassed. A short time later, after Charley had abandoned my lap, another little girl came and sat in my lap. I was praying the entire time that she didn't say anything about my scratchy legs, and thankfully she didn't.

The theme of the day was "chefs," so we talked about where they work, what they do, and then we proceeded to make pretend pizza's out of paper plates and cut-out ingredients for craft time. The rest of the morning flew by with playtime outside, snack time, playtime inside, reading stories, more circle time, and one more craft at the end of the day. After everyone left, I helped the teacher clean up the classroom, and then it was time to go. I really enjoyed meeting the other kids and observing their different personalities, especially Charley's.

I think I was met with a few surprises when it came to the dynamics in the class. First, I noticed that overall, Charley's class was very mellow and pretty quiet. The teacher explained that a lot of the reason is that this class consists of only four boys (two of whom were absent) and eight girls, so that makes the mood a lot more calm (go figure!). I was also surprised to see that the kids in this age group still tend to play by themselves more than playing with each other. I'm used to watching Charley around our friends' kids, kids that she is around ALL THE TIME, so I guess I'm used to seeing her interact more . . . but for some reason, in this class, the kids tend to play more individually. It was also fun to see how Charley behaves at school versus how she behaves at home. At home she is much more sassy, outspoken, and LOUD. At school she is much more quiet, much more polite (I think and hope anyway), she listens to the teacher much better then she listens to me, and she only speaks up occasionally. Don't get me wrong, she is not necessarily what I would call "shy" at school . . . she just tends to reserve her comments a lot more then she does at home. I also noticed that she thrives on the structure of the class (the routine, knowing what to expect, etc.), she frequently tries to enforce the rules (shushing other kids when they are talking too loud during story time), and she is good at following the rules (why can't she do this at home???).

After talking to my mom, it turns out that once again, Charley is my little clone. My mom said that it was almost as if I had two different personalities growing up . . . a home one and a school one. The thing is, she was always okay with this because I was polite to my teachers, followed the rules, and always got good grades . . . and as long as I kept this all up, she gave me a bit of leeway to be more of a sassy pants at home. It's not like she let me get away with being completely disrespectful at home or anything, but she just let me express the sassy aspect of my personality more without a lot of criticism. She let me be who I was.

So the lesson learned for the day . . . if my mom survived me for all those years, then I can certainly survive my little sassy pants too. :)