The activity started as it was planned. He sorted through the letters and pictures. It was not a surprise to see that he wanted to start with the letter D. It is the letter that starts one of his names. I was pleased to hear him say each of the letters as he sorted through them. He also said seemed to recognize all the pictures. This was going to be simple for him I thought.

All of a sudden he decided to change the activity. He placed an uppercase G down on a circle on a pea pod. Then he put down a frog. “Frog doesn’t begin with g,” I told him. “I know, but it ends with it,” he replied.  The activity was to match uppercase letters and beginning sounds so, this didn’t follow the rule of the activity.  It wasn’t suppose to find the ending sounds in uppercase and lowercase letters.

I have to admit I was a little frustrated. Doing this was going to leave a lowercase g without a circle to be placed on. I was sure he knew that frog began with the letter f. This just didn’t make sense.

“You know frog begins with a f,” he declared. “We don’t have the letter f on any of the circles,” I told him. “I can make one,” JDaniel stated. He got up from the kitchen table and went to the junk drawer in the kitchen hutch. Things in the drawer were pushed around and searched under things until he found what he wanted.

“I can make the letter f,” he said wheedling an orange marker. “There aren’t any extra circles,” I told him. With that he took the circle with the elephant on it and turned it over. On the back of the circle he wrote an uppercase F.

He was so proud of himself. He had come up with his own way to do the activity. I was proud of him for a number of reasons. He had taken a simple activity and made it a little more challenging. He had taken ownership of the activity. He had seen there was a problem and he had created a solution.

While I was proud of him and enjoyed seeing how he worked out this activity, I had to wonder what his kindergarten teacher would do if he did this next year.

Technically he destroyed the game and he didn’t demonstrate that he could match the upper and lowercase letters. He prevented himself from completely using all the circles by making the elephant circle an F. The teacher won’t be able to check off that he knew the skills this activity was assessing if he didn’t complete the whole activity correctly

If I hadn’t been sitting beside him to hear he talk about what he was thinking, I might not have known what he was doing. Next year he will be in a class filled with children. The teacher may give him a worksheet or activity to do and she may only have few minutes to assess his understanding.

We will probably talking about the importance of following the directions the teachers given him at school. I will need to be working on making sure he doesn’t complete every activity with an out of the box solution at home.

He is a really smart boy and I worry that someone who doesn’t know him well would miss that he really does  understand what to do. JDaniel is just one of those kids that thinks out of the box a lot. His mind is a fascinating place. Things are thought through, analyzed  synthesized and developed into new and original thoughts all of the time.

I am hoping and praying that he teacher next year will look at some of his work and ask him to teach her what he is thinking. You teach me is a parenting question I am going to be asking him again and again.