Kindergarten Homework

I knew Brennan would have a little homework in kindergarten, but I figured it would be an occasional worksheet and lots of reading logs.  I did not expect to get bombarded with projects right from the beginning!  Kindergarten is a lot of work for a parent!

First, Brennan brought home the class gingerbread man.  Each child in Brennan's class brings home the gingerbread man for one night, and then the parents document in a class journal what the gingerbread man did while at home with that child.  Since Brennan was the third child in his class to bring it home and he had been sick (thereby postponing his back-to-school celebration dinner), the lucky gingerbread man got to go to the Olive Garden!  Here he is, enjoying chocolate cake with Brennan:

Brennan cracked me up.  He treated that little guy like a real, visiting friend.  He even strapped him in a seatbelt on the way to the restaurant!

You wouldn't think it would be a big deal to write a quick journal entry, but by the time we had the kids in bed and I had packed lunches for the next day and done a few other things, I didn't get the journal entry done until almost 10:00 at night.  Late night for kindergarten homework!

Another project the kids had to do at school was make a shoebox business to go in Wee Willy Winkie's imaginary town.  We were to use alliteration, and it was an easy decision for Brennan to make Brennan's Bookstore.  We were expressly told not to do the project for the child, but to work together, so that is just what we did.

When I saw some of the final projects at the school, I was amused and amazed.  There are some very creative and ambitious parents out there!  Even still, I have no regrets about Brennan's project, as it is a perfect representation of him.  It is precise, detailed, accurate, represents something he loves, he did most of the work, and it makes perfect sense.  It is sooo Brennan.

Notice that three of Brennan's cars have disappeared.  :-(  I don't think he noticed because I brought the project home for him and put the stuff away.

To celebrate the end of their nursery rhyme unit, the whole kindergarten at Nolensville (well over a hundred kids) participated in a nursery rhyme parade.  Brennan was a spider, either from The Itsy Bitsy Spider, which I guess was a nursery rhyme before it was a song (also both Brennan and Cora's favorite song at Cora's age), or the spider from Little Miss Muffet.

Again, the creativity at the parade blew me out of the water!!  Some of the costumes were just amazing!!  We were told to make the costumes using items from around the house (I think the idea was to avoid canned, pre-made costumes), and that made the parade so much fun!  I honestly thought it would be lame, but I enjoyed it tremendously.

Brennan's costume was just black pants and a black shirt and two pairs of girls tights, cut apart and stuffed with poly-fill, then safety pinned to his shirt.  He wore black socks on his hands and feet and we took the waistband from one of the pairs of tights and made a headpiece, which Brennan decorated with paper eyes.  Pretty easy.

There is one more project I created for myself that is kind of silly.  I made Brennan a fun first-day-of-school lunch.  It consisted of tunafish sandwich on fish-shaped bread, "water" (blue jello), "fish food" (strawberries), and goldfish.  He loved it, but I learned an important lesson as a new kindergarten mom:  Teach your child to put the lid back on containers of unfinished food before putting them back in the lunch box!  (Imagine a lunch box full of watery, blue jello!)

I'm sure there are many, many things we will both learn this year!  :-)