November 5, 2005 - Saturday
I took Harry to a birthday party this afternoon for his friend from Pre-K and current classmate, Ethan. It was at gym kind of place where the kids could do a lot of running around through tubes, jumping in one of those inflatable castles, and diving into a big pile of foam pieces. There was also a room for pizza and cake, of course, and while the kids were eating I started talking with a mother who had volunteer to help out a couple of times in Harry's kindergarten class. She said the last time there she was at the "pattern" station, helping kids understand and build ABCABC patterns. It's a little unclear to me from her brief description exactly what they were doing, but her point was that Harry was the only one in the whole class that "really got it." My best guess as to what happened was that she would help the children build an ABCABC pattern and then have them do a new one by themselves. Most kids started over with a blank table. Harry, instead of pushing them all away, apparently moved two lettersd/blocks away (for example, the two As) and then just substituted two new ones (for example, two Ds). It was indeed a new ABCABC pattern (DCBDCB) and it showed that he both got it and was very clever about it.
In another interesting aside, another mother seemed to imply, although I'm not absolutely certain of this, that her daughter and all the other girls were all happy to see Harry come in. We know about Hadley. We didn't know about anything else.
Comments, Opinions?