They Said It

Gummy-bear boy, 6 years:

I'm girl-trapped!

[This was the outburst from the only boy in the reading group. And it didn't help that after he first said it, a girl tried to hug him.]

So after we exhausted the fact that he was girl-trapped, our group went on to study the ending "ink." We read words that end in ink. One of those words: stink. We used sentences with words ending in ink. Gummy-bear, girl-trapped boy (who this day was on a jelly bean kick), said: Everybody [long pause as he chose his word carefully] OUTSIDE of this school stinks. (Can you guess which word he was thinking of using first?)

Well, after reading words and making sentences and moving on to other activities, it was time to read in our book.

Me: Get your head out from under the table and sit up. It's time to read.

Boy: I don't like books; they stink.

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1st grade classroom, small group rotation, I'm sitting at a table with four students. After a couple of minutes it finally dawns on me (because noise in a classroom usually doesn't bother me) that one of my students is making odd loud noises. OK, they weren't odd to me. I realized why I didn't catch it at first: I speak whale too.

Me: OK, time to stop speaking whale.

Girl: [gives me an aren't-I-adorable-and-funny grin]

(Later she tried to entertain me by talking to her crayons: Hello crayon. Will you be my friend?—I see stand up comedy in her future)