We love our public school. We love the teachers. We love the principal. We love the other parents, the energy, the community. Do we know enough to love the education? Impossible to say, after five months. But we know this: Chloe couldn’t read full sentences in September. She can read full books now. She reads the weather report on the back page of the Metro section of the Washington Post. “Today. Rain. High 53. Low 34. Saturday. Partly cloudy. High 51. Low 39.” Our favorite forecast is for a “wintry mix.” We love how she says “wintry mix.” She also now can scan the agate list of other cities. Fairbanks, Alaska, is a favorite because it's cold enough to trigger exaggerated expressions of incredulity (though the concept of minus 32 degrees must be confusing on many levels). Without my asking, today she found and reported on San Francisco, because I'm traveling there next week.
In “reader’s workshop” in her classroom, each child gets a bag of four books they select from a level-appropriate box. Chloe is in the highest level. The books have two short sentences on each page. “We need to talk about that,” a teacher says. Weeks ago. Can we get her some harder books? We’re still testing. The sympatehtic librarian tells me that kindergarteners aren’t allowed to take out books. But she’ll sign them out to me. We take out three the first week—Mr. Putter does something, Nate the Great and the Phony Clue, Cam Jansen does something. She breezes through the first, concentrates and makes it through the second. Has more difficulty with the third, which has more lines of text per page, narrower leding, slightly more complex words.
The librarian is gone after Scrabble club. But she leaves the door open for me to return with Chloe and check out some new titles. Chloe and I browse the shelves. I show her how the books are group by subject. We pull books off the shelf and put them back. She settles on another Nate the Great, the same Cam Jansen, an Oliver and Amada Pig, and, to complete a class assignment, a book about the Earth. As soon as we get home—early, with plenty of time before dinner—she sits in one of her little chairs in her living room “office.” I lie on the couch under a blanket. She opens one of the new books—Oliver and Amanda’s Christmas by Jean Van Leeuwen—and reads it aloud. All 56 pages, nonstop, pausing only to show the class the pictures, or tease the class by occasionally refusing.
