OK, so it’s time for your child’s first week of kindergarten.
Don’t worry. As a timeworn veteran of shepherding two children
through kindergarten classes, several years ago, I’m here to help.
You already bought the new backpack, lunch pail and pencil
case.
OK, so it’s time for your child’s first week of kindergarten. Don’t worry. As a timeworn veteran of shepherding two children through kindergarten classes, several years ago, I’m here to help. You already bought the new backpack, lunch pail and pencil case.
And, like any good parent, you also bought packs of new pencils, erasers, ink pens, colored markers, binders and metallic star stickers. In brief, you’re done everything to prepare your child for their academic career.
But wait. Not so fast. There’s just one more teeny, tiny detail you need to know about school that isn’t on any of the lists they give you. You will need objects. Lots and lots of objects.
Why? Because it’s kindergarten and, chances are, there will be sharing there. Lots and lots of sharing. Not just casual sharing, mind you; more than likely, your child will be encouraged to share every day, five days a week, for the thirty-something weeks that make up the school year. Which, calculated out, means that approximately 5,387 bazillion objects will be hauled from your house out into public to endure the scrutiny of other people.
Let me just warn you: Lesser parents have cracked under the pressure.
Sure, at first it’s easy to find things lying around the house that are politically correct and socially acceptable. A postcard from your last vacation. A pair of binoculars. A fun hat. A few foreign coins. Maybe, if you get real lucky, a bird nest or something else from nature.
Really, it seems as if you could go on like this forever. But, then it happens: you run out of good stuff. The first sign is when your child brings a petrified cheese stick from the deli drawer. Next it’s an old Elvis eight track. Then, before you know it, you’re sending your child off to school with a bottle of catsup dressed in a Barbie ball gown.
The way I see it, when this happens you have three choices. Your first choice is to tell your child, in your best I’m-in-charge kind of a voice, to skip sharing. That it’s much more fun to listen than to share, anyway.
Ha, ha, they’ll say. Any five-year-old knows that Show-and-Tell gives structure and meaning to kindergarten life, and any kid without something to share risks losing his place on the rug or in line or, worse yet, being ignored altogether.
The second option is to recycle the stuff you already sent, this time thinly disguised. This isn’t as tricky as you might think. Most kindergartners won’t recognize the plastic camel your child brought to share way back in September, especially now that it’s wearing lipstick.
But the problem with this is that you’re bound to be found out. One day a kid will see right through the ribbons and masking tape and say, “Hey, didn’t I see that stuffed poodle somewhere else before?” Then your child will be humiliated since they broke the number-one-rule-of-sharing: things can only be brought once.
Then of course, you can always do what I used to do: work a trade with an equally desperate parent who has a child in another class.
I remember one morning I got what some would call a peculiar phone call.
“Hello?” I said.
“I have a picture of a beached whale and a bag of sea shells,” my friend Susie hissed on the other end of the receiver. “What do you have?”
“A homemade bird feeder, and a rock from the Grand Canyon.”
“Deal,” she said, and hung up.
Oh, all right, maybe it’s a little sneaky. Some people may even say it’s just plain wrong˜especially those of you who have closets full of vacation souvenirs that you‚d never part with. But me, I prefer to think of it more as “pooling available resources.”
And, hey, if that’s not the true spirit of sharing, I don’t know what is.
