Tag: paint shirts

My Anxiety Needed a Paint Shirt

Maybe you share this memory. At the beginning of my first 4 years of school, my dad would send me to school with an old shirt of his. It was usually an old dress shirt, but I want to say that one year it was an old T-shirt. This shirt became my “paint shirt” for the year. Any time we used paints, the paint shirt went on.

That being said, I want to briefly remind you of a time recently where “messy” play raised my anxiety level through the roof. That particular incident involved beans and noodles. Read about it here:

Macaroni and Beans!

It is interesting to re-read that now, since getting my ADHD diagnosis. They said that I do have some obsessive behaviors. Anyway, on to the payoff from the setups of this blog…

Today, the lady from Head Start was at the house. She brings various activities for the kids to do. She works on fine motor stuff, they have little projects to do, have a snack, and stuff like that.

Today, she said to the kids that they were going to paint. As soon as those words were out of her mouth, my anxiety began to rise. I really don’t understand why.

As a kid, I made a ton of messes! I played in mud, I rolled in dirt, and got stuff all over me. So why should it drive me crazy when my kids do stuff like that? The only thing I can think of is that I don’t want to clean up the mess, or I’m afraid they will ruin something. I really don’t know.

It started innocently enough. Ella and Andrew dipped their fingers in the paint jar and began making dots on the paper. Then they began to smear it on the paper. Then in a blink of an eye, Andrew had dumped the jar of paint on his paper and was smashing it all over the place!

Kids do this! They like this! They love making messes! This kind of thing should NOT be a surprise to me. However, it took my anxiety to the brink! I was literally almost shaking!

Sam and the Head Start teacher got a chuckle out of it. Sam knows this drives me crazy. It is the beans and macaroni incident all over again. I did everything in my power to stay in control or myself, but I must not of did that good a job, because Sam saw through me right away.

Midway through the project, both Sam and I went to separate sinks to wash hands and such. We did however, get some nice art work.

I wonder what the project will be next week…

Monday Memory

Do you remember SRA cards?!? 

I remember these from elementary school.  I want to say that we started using them in 4th grade. 

Basically, it was a box of card that were color coded based on difficulty level. Each card contained a story on a topic and questions to answer about it. There were also vocabulary words you had to find in the story.

I remember there being some very interesting topics, but I seem to remember a lot of topics that just didn’t peak my interest.

A search of the internet found these pictures of an SRA card:

After reading the story, it was time to answer the questions:

Grading was on the honor system. There were answer key cards in the box as well.

As I recall, in our classes anyway, there was a specific number of cards you had to read and tests to pass before moving on to the next level.

Some people read faster and comprehended better than others. There was probably a chart up on the bulletin board with everyone’s name and gold stars for every test you passed.

I had never heard of Arthur Ashe (the tennis player) before SRA cards. The only reason I remember this is because I kept calling him Arthur Ash-ee and the teacher corrected me.

Thinking about these and writing about them reminds me of other things from elementary school that I should write about later….

* Academic Olympics

* Weekly Readers

* Book Fairs

* Paint shirts

Maybe another day ….