Gavinisms

Gavin started attending a Christian montessouri school a few weeks ago. His teacher, Ms. V who is a retired montessauri teacher of 30 years, and her husband, Mr. Ken just started this school to stay busy during retirement. She does the teaching and he works in his woodshop building her shelves and manipulatives, etc.

After only two weeks she has commented that he picks things up very quickly and believes he'll be reading by September at the rate he is going. He also knows and recognizes his numbers up to 13. Meaning not only can he count that high, he can also count out that many objects and match them up to their corresponding number. He is loving his school and learning. He especially loves going to the woodshop and helping Mr. Ken. They just made a bird feeder and Gavin was excited to go feed the birds the next morning.


The other day she tells me, "We sure enjoy Gavin. He's is our whole world. I asked my husband why we didn't do this 5 years ago." Almost every day she has another story to tell me about the funny things Gavin has done or said. I'm assured that he is very polite in his corrective comments, just in case you were worried.

Today he took a magazine full of what I called scary things for show and tell. He showed me the picture of the poisonous snake and said, "See? It's not scary! It's not moving because it's not real!" He repeated the same story to his teacher as I was dropping him off this morning to make sure she was okay and not afraid of his magazine pictures.

Last week he came to school with two black eyes after playing "konfu panda" with Lily, falling and hitting his eyes - one time on furniture while attempting some kind of back roll and the other one on his sister's head while doing another move. When Mr. Ken asked him what happened he told him this story: "My dad and I were fighting and I had my eyes covered like this," he holds his little fists up to demonstrate protecting his eyes. "When I brought down this hand to punch him he got me right in this eye. And then I brought down this hand to punch him this way and boom! He got me in this eye!" Mr. Ken looked at him in awe and said, "Really?" Gavin turned to walk away, turned back and said, "No, I fell!"

On the first day, Ms. V was teaching the kids the prayer song for the food. After she was done Gavin cocked his brow, looked at her and said, "That's not a prayer. This is a prayer." He then proceeded to demonstrate the "correct" way to bless your food. When he was finished the teacher simply said, "M---, do you mind if Gavin says all the blessings on the food?" The other little boy replies, "Oh, no."

On another day the other little boy there said, "I don't know how to pray." Gavin confidently looks at him and says, "Don't worry, I'll teach you." 

At the end of the first two weeks, Gavin let the teacher say the prayer again. Then he looked at her, sighed  and said, "You're still not doing it right."

Not to dim his spirits, but I felt like perhaps his insistance might become more offensive than necessary, so finally I told him, "Darling, I need to teach you a big word, it's called, 'tolerance'. It means we let Ms. V say her prayers the way she wants to say them." He retorted, "But she's trying to bless the whole earth! She can't do that." I asked, "Why not?" He replied, "Because, she just can't."

After Ms. V read the poem about what little boys and girls are made of, Gavin commented, "That's not right. We're made of bones and Heavenly Father made our bones!"

Gavin's teacher is convinced he will grow up to be a minister. I just chuckled and thought, well probably something like that.