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What a difference a teacher makes; Bean has been doing just amazing since the switch back to the Clownfish class. The almost compulsive nose-picking she had been doing has stopped, her behavior has improved and Miss Stephanie reports that if you just take a second to talk to her when she's upset, she's easy to reason with. Huh. What a novel idea - talk to the kid instead of belittling and humiliating her. Who'd have thought *that* was the solution?
(An aside: when Bean was doing her yoga at school the other day, she was in the gym with one other teacher and a bunch of kids. The evil bitca teacher showed up to assist - I watched as Bean's face shifted from joyous and smiling to this unsmiling, tense look. It. was. awful. Thankfully she looked up and saw me and I was smiling and waving and blowing kisses, so she recovered quickly. She might have recovered quickly even if I hadn't been there - she's a tough kid. But that instant shift from happy to sad was really hard to see.)
Yesterday when I dropped the girls off, Bean's teacher was all excited to tell me something, so I went and dropped O in her room and went back. Apparently during bean's nap refusal yesterday, Stephanie took her with her to go give another teacher a break. That teacher is new, so she had administered a Kindergarten 'here's what I know' type test to the kiddos in her class, just so she knew where the majority were, learning-wise. For shiggles, Stephanie gave Bean the test.
She totally nailed it, and then some.
Stephanie said "she blew me away!" Only thing she didn't nail was her address and phone number, but in her defense we've never told her that and she has two addresses and phone numbers. She had Dave's city and my subdivision, though :)
She can count to 99, identify numbers and letters, write her name, knows her left from right (which Stephanie was really wowed by, but seems kinda mundane to me), knows her colors, etc. The coolest part to me was the color part. There were like, what, 10 or so color names written in boxes, and the test goes something like: the teacher says the color and the kid selects the right color and puts a check in the box indicated. Stephanie had to get up before the last three were done, and she came back to find that Bean had put an orange check in the "orange" box. Here's how the subsequent conersation went:
Stephanie: did you put that check in the orange box?
Bean: Yes.
S: Why did you do that?
B: Because that box says orange.
S: How do you know?
B: Because orange starts with o and that word starts with o.
S: (pausing) and what about the other two (unchecked) boxes?
B: Well, (pointing to the pink box), that one says 'pink' and there's no pink marker. And that one (pointing to the white box) says white, and it's already white.
S: ... ... ...
It's already white. I *love* that. The deductive reasoning on the pink and orange boxes was awesome, but the comment on the white box is what blows
me away.
Based on her testing, and the nice new teacher in the Blue Tang room, they'll be moving Bean up before the official August move-up the rest of the kids will be doing. She'll be going to the 4-4.5 year old room Monday, I believe, to see if that's a good fit for her. Honestly, though, her being with a good teacher is far more important to me than her being in an age-appropriate room, if that makes sense? The raving bitca that was in Manta Ray would never have thought that Bean was smart and perhaps acting out because she was bored (Miss Stephanie's theory), so Bean being with her peers wasn't all that helpful to her in that case.
I'll now be spending my free time smartening up so that I can keep up with my big girl :)
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