Teacher Appreciation Week

a post alternately titled
My Child is a Genius

This week is Teacher Appreciation Week. We certainly do love Ms. Tammy. I hope we appreciate her, and she knows by our appreciation that we value everything she does for P. I wanted to make sure we did something special for Ms. Tammy, so when P announced on Tuesday, "I would like to write a story. It is a story of Ms. Tammy," I thought, Woo hoo! A little something for Teacher Appreciation Week! (Don't worry; I know teachers get lots of homemade stuff, and they can't keep it all. We got her a gift card to the movie theater, too. But I do think P's story is nice.)
So Tuesday P told me his story, and Tuesday night I typed it up and made it into a booklet. This morning, we sat down together to do the illustrations. I read P a page, and he would decide what to draw. He wanted almost no help. And the "genius" part? I am so impressed by how well his pictures go with the story. And with a model to look at, he wrote his whole first name and his teacher's name. I did not know he could do that! (I knew he had the first three letters of his name down, but the rest was a surprise.) I almost scanned the finished book, but I decided just to take pictures and blog about it. The illustrations are a bit hard to see, because the medium he chose almost exclusively was colored pencil, but I still wanted to share his "story" with you here.

Here we have a picture of P's school from the outside. The steeple is on the right side of the roof, and there's a (very faint) cross on the left side of the roof. The building is purple. His school is white, but hey, I guess this is a prime example of artistic license.

In P's words, (about the left hand page) "That's Ms. Tammy. Her hair is black." And the right hand page? "The boo boo is above my eye. And on my face. An' it's bleedin'. See?"

And here's P's entire first name, taking up a two page spread.

The left hand page is a picture of the computer in P's classroom, complete with dots for "buttons" (the keys on the keyboard). The right hand page has a picture of a sandbox with a dump truck "for playin' in the sand".

P wanted to write Ms. Tammy's name next, so that takes up the left hand page. He copied it from a model that I wrote out for him. I was impressed again with his mad copying skills. The very last page has a heart. P was quite certain that he didn't want any help drawing his heart, so I let him have at it.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!