Star of the Week

It is N's turn to be Star of the Week in his classroom this week. This means:

1. Bringing in photos of himself, which the teacher will put up on the bulletin board, along with the 'paper doll' version of N that we made earlier this year as a homework project;

2. Bringing in his favorite toy (a stuffed dog named Spotty that Em's friend Jen gave him a couple of years ago for his birthday) and his favorite book (Catwings Return by Ursula LeGuin--and if you haven't read the Catwings series to your child yet, stop RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE and go and do that immediately) to 'share' with the class when he tells them about himself later in the week.

3. Bringing in a baggie full of Fruit Loops of any number between 20 and 50, so that the class can play a guessing and estimating game with N as the leader...after which they will share the Fruit Loops.

Most importantly, being Star of the Week means being the Calendar Monitor, which itself means taking the class through almost all of its morning paces--figuring out the date and day of the week, charting the weather, determining how best to represent the number of days in school using various coins, and much, much more.

I had warned the teacher. "You might want to wait a little longer; you might want to let him go last," I told her. "Seriously. You might want to consider what happened last year." But she scoffed at me and said that he would be ready; that he WAS ready.

So all weekend I prepped him. "Wow, won't it be exciting to be Star of the Week?" I said.

"Yeah," he said. "But it'll be scary."

He wasn't the only one who was scared.

So imagine my surprise when Baroy called from the school yard after picking N up today to tell me that his teacher said N was absolutely PERFECT as Star of the Week. Not only did he get up there to do the calendar, she reported, but he announced, "I need a chair to stand on so I can reach everything." And so he got one, and stood on it, and he reached EVERYTHING. Didn't want to miss out on a second of this moment in the spotlight, apparently.

[When I asked him about how it went, he looked at me with wide, happy eyes and said, "I told Mrs. N that I was going to be scared. But I wasn't! I wasn't scared at all!"]

Baroy said that the teacher was a little smug in her recital of just how well it went (and well she should be). And he reported that when he tried to explain our worry by saying, "Well, after how hard it was to get him to do it last year..." she apparently interrupted him by saying, "I heard about last year. This is definitely not last year."

She is so right. This is not last year. This a whole new year, a whole new ball game. This is a whole new N. Emphasis, it seems, on the whole.