An "A" for Effort

One of the trickiest letters to write is lower-case "A". I can never remember which side of the circle the line goes. This is really troubling since this letter is in my name, Aidan. To get around this problem, I've taken to using a capital A in all circumstances, so when I sign my name it's "AidAn" or, sometimes "AidAN". While this sort of spelling convention seems to work well for dot-com firms (like eBay), it doesn't wash in Miss Nelson's class.

As a result, Mommy put into place a cunning plan. Every time I successfully make a lower-case "A", I get a penny. Yesterday, I made 4 "A's" and, as I proudly shwed Daddy that evening, this netted me four whole cents. While I used to view making this letter as quite a chore, it's a whole different ballgame when I get paid to do it. This morning, I talked about my day with Daddy. I told him

Today I'm going to make a thousand lower-case A's. How much will I mkae for that?

I learned two things from this conversation: First, one thousand A's is worth $10 and second, if I actually did this, my hand would be sore for a week. Maybe I'll stick with smaller amounts for now.

Star of the Week - Update

Each day, I have a different star of the week responsibility. On Tuesday, my job was to bring in a story to read. I try to pick stories that are especially likely to amuse. For example, at a recent evening reading event, I brought in the book I Stink, which is about a garbage truck. For my star of the week offering, I brought in Bats at the Beach. While I really like this book, it didn't have sufficiently many gross parts to make the audience roll on the floor lauging uncontrollably. The best parts were when the book talked about the foods the bats liked to eat during their trips to the beach. These include "salted skeeters" and "roasted big-mallows."

Teddy Bear Cholla

On Wednesday, my job was to bring in some pictures of a place I went and explain them. While Mommy suggested I bring in shots of DC, I opted for desert pictures from Arizona. I brought in pictures of saguaro and barrel cactus, as well as cholla and prickly pear. I explained each of the pictures. My friend Logan was very impressed. He said the pictures were very cool. My teacher, Miss Nelson, was also impressed. She said she learned a lot about cactus from me. In particular, she did not know that you can tell the age of a saguaro from how many arms it has

Star of the Week

I have extra responsibilities this week since I'm the star of the week. I was all excited this morning. I popped out of bed, put on clothes quickly, and zipped off to eat breakfast. I did not want to be late. This promises to be the most fun week of Kindergarten ever!

Weird Phrases

I've picked up a bunch of phrases, mostly from movies (none of which I've seen) that I like to say. Here are my top 5:

1. "Give me a little room to breathe" (Col. Bill Kilgore, Apocalypse Now)
2. "Brains...brains" (Night of the Living Dead)
3. "You do X like you fix roads...lousy" (Doc Hudson in Cars)
4. "It's not the worst X I've ever seen. It's not the best either." (David Feherty, Tiger Woods game)
5. "Destroy the Humanoids" (Robot words from video game Berzerk)

Flying Solo

Today was my first "solo flight" at homework. As you know, each week, we have to memorize a poem about the letter of the week. This week's letter was "R". Normally, I have my friend Christopher do the poem with me in case I forget anything, but Christopher was away from school on a trip today, so I was flying solo.

At breakfast, I recited the poem for Mommy and Daddy and totally nailed it, so I was pretty confident. I recited the poem in school all by myself and I got...starry eyes---the highest grade. Hooray for me!

Writing

I've been adding a lot of writing to my cards and other things I make for Mommy and Daddy. What I like to do is to figure out the first letter in each word I want to say and then write this on the card---sort of like texting. For some words, I add a couple of letters. Here's an example:

T hdr
F Aidan
D u n ur n 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ...

Translation:

To Heather
From Aidan
Do you know your numbers? 1, 2, 3, ...

Writing seems pretty useful.

The Letter of the Week

This week's letter is "r". We get a preview of the letter of the week on Friday and then get our homework the following Monday. The main part of the homework is a poem using the letter of the week. Over the weekend, Daddy and I speculated about what this poem would be. We came up with

R R for Rodney Rat
Rooting through rubbish
Rotting rubbery
Radishes. Rusting
Roadster
RRRR for Rodney Rat

The poem is of a specific form---the first line is always the letter twice repeated followed by the name of the animal. Then there are four words starting with the letter. Followed by one more word. Then the animal again.

Urban Planner

I've been making lots of urban planning pictures. I like to make pictures of towns, cities, farms, and even baseball stadiums. You can see my latest collection here.

Story Night

Tonight was story night at my school. This means that some of the teachers read stories and a whole bunch of the Mommies and Daddies read stories too. I got to hear about a zillion stories. Some were ones that I knew, like Click clack Moo. Cows that Type others were new to me. There was one, The Giving Tree that is really sad. In fact, it was too sad for me to sit through. I had a lot of fun hearing stories though.

Homework---Results

My homework assignment was due on Friday, and I did great. I totally nailed the Sammy Snake poem and got a smiley face with two stars for eyes--the highest possible score. This week's assignment is Missy Mouse (in honor of the letter of the week, "M"). I'm less excited about Missy than I was about Sammy the Snake, but I should do well with this also.

Showtime

Well, homework is due today. I think I'm prepared. Two of my assignments involve reciting things. One of the recitations is the Pledge of Allegiance, which I hate to say. The other, Sammy the Snake, is more fun. Here it is:

ssss Sammy Snake
Seesaw sandwiches
Silly soup
Saturdays
Ssss Sammy Snake

Picture Day

It's picture day at school today. While this is not such a big deal for me, it is for Mommy. She was fretting about what outfit I should wear and what color backdrop will be most complementary to my coloring. (She settled on blue.) One not so fun thing about picture day is that Mommy is fussier than usual when it comes to my hair. I don't really liked to have my hair brushed---instead preferring the natural look---but Mommy definitely wants it to be somewhat in place for the picture.

Homework

A milestone for me happened earlier this week. I got my first batch of homework. (Yes, there is homework in Kindergarten these days.) There are actually a bunch of things I have to do by the end of the week. They include learning the pledge of allegiance, learning a poem about Sammy the snake, tracing the letter s in various places, and some sort of social studies. I've nailed the snake poem already, and I'm pretty confident about tracing the S's. I don't know about the other things though. The Bell school is pretty tough.

Ice Cream Social

It was a busy weekend this weekend. On Sunday, the whole three family went off to play miniature golf in Livermore. It was really fun. I putted pretty well and really enjoyed playing. Daddy putted extremely well and ended up finishing 1 under for the course. After that, we went home and watched football for a little bit before going off to the ice cream social/gong show at my school. I liked the ice cream part quite a bit, but the gong show part, where the Daddies were supposed to showcase their talent, was a bit boring. Overall, it was a really fun day.

Daddy took some pictures with his new camera at both events. One of the things he's most excited about with this camera is his 50mm prime lens. He especially likes the "bokeh" from this lens. Apparently, if you set it in a particular way, you van get a laser sharp image of the subject while softly blurring everything in the background. The ice cream social shots (those where I don't have a golf club) are good examples of this effect. You can view them here.

Christopher

Last night, I went over to visit with my new school friend Christopher while Mommy and Daddy went to the opera. Initially, I was quite worried about this visit since the original plan called for me to go to sleep at Christopher's house until Mommy and Daddy came to pick me up after the opera. Fortunately, Christopher's Mommy was kind enough to agree to take me back to my home for bedtime (the only live a couple of blocks away). While this was a good thing, Christopher and I came up with an even better plan--we decided that it would be great if he could come over to visit my house since he hadn't seen it. So off we all went to my house. It was really exciting showing him all the many toys. I also pointed out some of my sports stuff since Christopher is a really big sports fan. (He got TWO football helmets for his birthday and we decked out in Alex Smith garb last night). It turned out to be a great night.

Late Already

Well, it only took me two days of school to be late. Everyone got up at the usual time on Tuesday (around 7am) and things seemed to be proceeding well, but I was in no particular hurry to do anything. I put on my clothes at a leisurely pace (no clothing races for me today), I lingered over breakfast and got distracted by all the interesting comings and goings around me. In the end, I got to school 3 minutes late. While I come home with a positive attitude, the thought of starting each new day at my new school makes me very nervous and I'd rather put it off as long as I can.

Daddy said I had

A bad case of the slows

(An aside from Daddy: The quote "a bad case of the slows" is actually due to Abraham Lincoln who used it to describe General George H. Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga.)

(A double aside: I understand that Gen. Thomas was my great grandfather's favorite general in the Civil War, at least according to Daddy.)

First Day of Kindergarten

Monday was my first day of kindergarten. I was pretty nervous about the whole thing and didn't sleep well the night before. I asked what would happen if I fell asleep during class. Since the first day only lasted a little more than an hour, Daddy and Mommy didn't think this was very likely to happen. The first day of school was pretty fun and, best of all, I got a bunch of gifts for surviving the first day. One of the absolute best gifts was a Chick Hicks from the movie Cars (my favorite movie and, in my opinion, the best movie of all time). Chick is the mean car who crashes into the other race cars on purpose while trying to win the Piston Cup. Apparently, Disney/Pixar underestimated the demand for this bad guy car, so Chick has been a hard item to find. I am very happy to finally own Chick so that I can punish him again and again for the bad things he did to The King and Lightning in the movie.

Who is the lefty?

Answer: Barry Zito.

Kindergarten Open House

Yesterday evening, I got to take a sneak peak at my Kindergarten classroom in the "Bell School" (as I refer to the Alamo School owing to the large bell on its sign). It was a pretty neat classroom with lots of interesting things to see and do. There was a large board with numbers from 1 to 100, a calendar with patterns of tulips and stars labeled with the days of the month, lots and lots of dinosaurs, and so many other things. I also got to meet the teachers as well. I was very happy to be visiting and quickly settled into making patterns with wooden blocks in geometric shapes (including my favorite shape---the hexagon).

I also discovered that Grady, a person who is in Garden School, will also be going to the Bell School for Kindergarten. I hope he's in my class! I think it will be fun to go to the Bell School.

Aidan Morgan: Teaching Assistant

I helped with Daddy's class today. It seems that his class is playing the OPEC game and a coin flip determines whether the game continues. Check out how I determined the results for market A here and market B here in two short videos Daddy and I made.