SOME SOMETHING SATURDAY: KINDERGARTEN

The Etsy Bloggers Carnival, which I missed again, had two choices this time: Tell about a favorite kindergarten memory, or a Labor Day tradition.

Well, we don't really have any Labor Day traditions, so I'm telling about kindergarten, and showing you what I looked like w-a-a-a-y back then!

This is me:


I went to two kindergartens. We moved from California to Hawaii just before I turned six, which meant a new school. (It was so close to my sixth birthday, in fact, that I had my birthday party on board ship, with the captain presiding. How cool is that?!)

I remember Dad driving me to my first day of kindergarten in Honolulu. On the way, he told me my teacher's name was Miss Chu. "Chew! That's a funny name!" I said. Dad responded by telling me that mine wasn't any less funny, which gave me something to think about. I don't think I ever again thought of someone's name as odd after that. I'd just compare it to my last name--Pegg--and remember.

The school "room" was a quonset hut. Now that I think about it, that's pretty cool, too, since it basically meant we got a whole little building for a classroom. I remember the door step, and the rounded end of it as we walked up. We were living in a quonset hut at the time, so the building itself didn't seem odd to me.

That's not ours up there, but that's what they looked like, all right!

So what do I remember about kindergarten? The arts and crafts, of course!

I remember Miss Chu had a primitive mimeograph, one where she had sort of a jelly in the bottom of a 13X9" pan, and she's lay sheets of paper face down on it to print them. It fascinated me.

But also I remember learning how to made a picture of a bear that was "furry", using a cut-out of one as a reverse stencil, laying leaves on sheets of paper and then brushing a paint-laden toothbrush over a screen to splatter paint the sheet, removing the leaves when the paint was dry, and one craft I keep meaning to try again: We cut brown paper bags into strips, almost all the way across, but not quite. One bag was cut on the vertical axis, the other the horizontal. Then we wove the two bags together to make place mats, and varnished them. They looked really good, and were sturdy, too. I was quite thrilled with the result.

Oh, and another: Dipping strings in paints, and laying them in squiggly lines between two sheets of paper, putting the sheets in the middle of a big phone book and then pulling the strings out. The designs that made were rather like the aurora borealis.

Last thing I remember about kindergarten? Cockleburs! We didn't have them in California, but they were thick in Hawaii. I spent a lot of time pulling the prickly little balls out of my ankle socks.

Wow. Hadn't thought of that in a very long time.

School days, school days,
Good old golden rule days....