by D. Raposa

Created on: March 07, 2009   Last Updated: April 08, 2009

"Zippity Doo Da, Zippity Ay".

We sang it every morning. We sang really loud because Mrs. Silveira played the piano really loud because she was hard of hearing. It was understandable since she was at least 75 years old at the time.

After our morning vocal exercise, we did the patriotic thing by saluting the flag and saying the "Pledge of Allegience". As a whole, the class hated doing this, not because of any idealogical objection, but because it was just plain boring. And it ushered in the most horrible part of the morning...

But first, a musical interlude.

We didn't butcher "America the Beautiful" as terribly as usual, which pleased Mrs. Silveira so much that we had to sing it twice. Prolonging the agony of what was to come...

Printing. To most people this wouldn't seem such a horrible practice, but it was. We got a lot of crap for not being able to hold a pencil correctly - how could we when the pencils were gigantic 1-inch round? And heaven forbid if the top of the capital "A" did not reach all the way up to the solid line on the paper and the lowercase "b" didn't hit the dotted line and......insane. And Mrs. Silveira's constant sing-song yammering of the alphabet while banging on those ivories did not help our 6-year old concentration levels.

Cheers filled the classroom when singing "Dem Bones" because it meant our favorite part of the morning - snack time! The mysterious Milk Lady (nobody ever knew her name) came into our classroom with a trayful of milk cartons in exchange for our precious dimes. While everybody got milk, classmates who did not bring a snack were to be pitied, so we shared our Oreos, Fig Newtons and Chips Ahoy with them. Mrs. Silveira continued playing her piano as she ate a sandwich, warbling some little ditty about children eating more fruits and vegetables.

Inevitably there was a bathroom break, which Mrs. Silveira hated because we took forever to go. We were wasting valuable piano-playing time!

Back in the classroom, we settled down to one of our favorite games - colored bingo - a complicated game involving gigantic crayons, which resulted in someone yelling bingo and claiming the coveted prize: the chance to make a bookmark by attaching a picture to oaktag USING GLUE! Glue (like regular scissors and ballpoint pens), was a grown-up thing. It was an honor to be trusted to do grown-up things!

In celebration of the completed bookmark, Mrs. Silveira got back on the piano for a rollicking rendition of "Candy Man". We marched and skipped around the room, playing our tambourines, triangles and some wooden block that you banged on with a mallet (which wasn't instrument-looking enough, so whoever was stuck with it was to be pitied and allowed to bring up the rear in our makeshift conga line).

Settling down, we talked about what we had learned that day, how important it was to share, yadayadayada. Then one final revisit of "Zippity Doo Da" and we were done for the morning.

Back to the cloakroom to collect our belongings, and we marched out of the classroom in a straight line. We had survived Mrs. Silveira and her crazy piano. We had conquered another day of half-day-kindergarten.

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