Lately, Ana's been saying they watched a movie in gym.

We knew she didn't mean that, because, really, Ana will say anything (today she said it was rude for me to call her by her first middle and last, and her teacher told her that!), but she had to have gotten the idea from somewhere, right? (With the name thing, it turned out some kids had learned her teacher's first name, and her teacher has been correcting them on the matter for a while now, and that's all.)

Which reminded me of my promise to get some games for the school (not that I really care about movies during lunch, really, but I remember the one year I had recess, 5th grade, I *hated* having to watch a movie when I'd rather be doing something else! LOL, so it's always good to have options), but I wanted to make sure they'd be well-received, so I went down to the PTA with my sister to make my offer:

1. I'd get some games - and with that established, once they come in I'll ask the chair or whoever if they can solicit a bid for donated games.

2. I'd be willing to teach unfamiliar games (like Sleeping Queens) to interested staff members

3. The games could be used for indoor recess, indoor after-lunch, and PTA meetings if they get bored of showing movies for the kids, on the theory that more choices are better. (I also suggested that one of their monthly family fun nights could be a game night, but that may have been overlooked.)

4. I have just emailed a list of good games (listed by educational value!) to the assistant principal, so there we go.

They were pretty enthused, and - bubbling with success - I offered to get some jump ropes and whatnot, also for the aftercare, but also for gym. It's a new school, as I've said, and they're still low on supplies.

So, what sort of supplies would be good for active movement for indoor recess or gym? I'm thinking a lot of jump ropes, chinese jump ropes, things of that ilk, but what else? I don't want to get anything that could be disruptive to students doing quiet things, so no basketballs or anything like that.

Random randomness

Remember when I said I liked the folk process? Somebody said it was all called folklore when they took it in school, and yes, that's interesting, but no, what *really* fascinates me is the mere fact that things change, and looking at how different they are and figuring out why. Collecting different songs is interesting enough, but collecting 100 of the same song and tracking the differences? THAT is cool.

And it's the interest in changes that, I'm realizing, ultimately drives many of my other interests. Here I thought I had wide-ranging interests and perseverations, but no, upon closer inspection it's clear to me that they're all aspects of the same one. (Except for the ones that aren't, of course, like babywearing. But that's ultimately practical in nature.)

Why am I saying this now? Somebody elsewhere mentioned playing cops and robbers as a child. That, combined with the suggestion to get hula hoops for Ana's school reminded me of the way we used hula hoops when I was in kindergarten, living on West 10th Street. We used them to catch people in Cops and Robbers. No guns of any sort, in my memory, but the hula hoops to catch people.

Which reminded me of two things from living there. West 10th Street was our first apartment in Brooklyn. Prior to that, I'd lived in Louisiana. I was 3 when we left Louisiana and moved... well, home, really, to my mother's home city anyway.

And I very clearly remember sitting on our stoop (we do have a stoop here on Staten Island, but I hardly think of it as one because it's immediately followed by the steps of the porch. Tangent, sorry) playing the game King of the Hill. Except... I remember so clearly thinking how some people called it Lion's Mountain. Or Lion's Rock, I don't know - something with Lion in it, anyway.

I also remember sitting by somebody's fence looking at the bugs and thinking how strange it was that in Louisiana they called those bugs lightning bugs, but in Brooklyn they said fireflies. As an adult, looking at a dialect map, I can see that the terms are about evenly spread out in both areas, but as a kid it seemed I'd gone from a place of universal lightning bugs to a place of universal fireflies! (And, to be honest, I always have and always will prefer the term lightning bug.)

The fact that there could be these big differences really has stuck with me for a long time, you know.

When I was at Stuy, the school got a grant for some Magnetic Poetry stuff.

They got a few packages of Magnetic Poetry, which was nice, but the really nifty thing was the board to put it on. They had a big - like 5 or 6 feet tall - folding screen, and you could stick the magnets on either side of it. It had... three segments? And I think a bin to hold extra magnets in. Stood up on its own like a changing screen. I gotta go.

Is it possible to buy one of those?

Visual thesaurus?

Very nifty. Probably not $20 a year nifty, but nifty nonetheless.