Zed

The kids at school still find me awfully funny, but I'm not sure they actually trust anything I am trying to teach them.

After the seasons and number of days in the year fiasco last month (still to be posted - turns out the seasons in Australia don't start on the same day as the rest of the world and um, yeah, there are 365 NOT 356 days in the year ANYWHERE on the globe!) the school is still letting me come in and volunteer in the classrooms.

Must be desperate for volunteers!

Yesterday was fun though.  I get to do writing with Andrew's 3/4 class.  The kids really inspired me with their fantastically imaginative descriptions of an ancient castle sitting in the middle of a misty lake.  (And yes, I had trouble writing that sentence after all the more evocative descriptions I read yesterday.)

I have definitely got to pick Sophie's mind for some of her stories.  Tyla too.  I'm thinking of a book of childrens' stories about the floods last year.

Then there's the poetry.  I'm sure it comes as no surprise to anyone in my former writers' group that the kids are way better at it than I ever was.  Never mind that they are supposed to be writing in complete sentences.  Correcting Samantha's free flow of words would have destroyed it entirely.  Beautiful.  She would have gotten an "F" in Germany - not a complete sentence on the page.  Here, we figure we'll work on the sentences later and recognise the thoughts and flow.  Work in progress and all that!

Spelling, for the most part, was not the strong point.  I helped the best I could.  (I know now, for instance that 'gray' is spelled 'grey'.)

When Connor asked me to spell 'frozen' though, we hit the latest snag.  He had the F and R so I continued with O and Z.  He looked at me as if I came from another planet.  Which, I guess I do.

Zee?  ZEE?  WHAT THE HECK IS THIS LADY TALKING ABOUT?!

Andrew, one row back, was probably snickering his little butt off - it's a running battle in our house and has been ever since Boeblingen English Playgroup in Germany.  (You have never seen the alphabet song become such a battleground, the Americans and - well, the rest of the English-speaking world - belting out their versions of that final letter at top decibel!  I have never been too committed to Americanisations - but fondly remember my mother and father battling it out laughingly over that same letter.  I choose to continue the struggle for the sheer fun and history of it.)

By the time I corrected myself to ZED, little Connor had convinced himself it was spelled with an S anyway.  Although I DO admit to mixing up Zed and S on a regular basis - Americanization, for example  (Is that even a word?!),  I am fairly certain that frozen is spelled with a zee.

Connor chose to look it up in the dictionary.

Which I like to think means that I am teaching the kids something after all!