The Goodness of Colors

Grace's Kindergarten class has a color system to track and report kids' behavior throughout the day. It goes like this:

Everyone starts on green. Green is what you start on and green is what you want to end on. Green is good.

If the child does something against the rules but stops the behavior once the child is reminded by the teacher, the child moves to blue. Blue is ok-- not as good as green, but not as bad as yellow.

You get a yellow, if you are repeatedly told not to do something but continue to do it anyway. Yellow is not good. But it's not as bad as red.

Red is when the behavior doesn't stop after the reminders and warnings, and it requires a note home the parents. You do not want to end the day on red.

At the end of the day, the child's color is recorded on a calendar that gets sent home for the parents to see. Grace has gotten a green every day so far except this past Wednesday, and on Wednesday, she got a yellow. She got a yellow and a note home to us which the assistant teacher explained is not exactly with their system. Usually, a note isn't written home until the child gets a red. But because Grace wasn't clear that getting a yellow wasn't good, the teacher thought to write a note home in hopes we could talk to her about the goodness of the colors.

Grace's infraction is that she won't stay quiet and still during naptime. (No shocker to us). Kids aren't forced to sleep or even close their eyes (if I knew how to force this I'd be doing it on the weekends!) but they do need to remain on their towels and they are not to talk to their classmates. Grace is having great difficulty following these rest-time rules. So, at the end of the day when she got a yellow, her response was "Yay! I got a yellow!"

Wed. evening I explained to her that even though yellow is a perfectly nice color and all, it's not a great color to end the day on. Green is good. Green is what we want to end the day on and you need to try as hard as you can to follow the rules in her classroom, even when it's really hard. David even took it a step further and said that if she got a green the next day and continued to get greens, he would go shopping with her and they could buy some running gear and begin to run together. Deal? Deal. With a hug and a handshake, Grace got it.

Thursday she came home with a green and we all celebrated. Even her former teachers and director at SFFA, where David takes her after school. They all know the system and grill her each afternoon on what color she got.

So yesterday when I checked in with David by phone in the afternoon, he told me that he did something bad. He said that when he picked Grace up from school at 2:45 PM and asked her what color she got, she smiled and said, "Green." "GREEN??? AGAIN??!!" He was furious and reemed her out while her bottom lip eventually began to curl. She sat in the back seat all the way to SFFA with Daddy cross with her for getting a green at school. Again.

They walked into SFFA and the first thing Adriana asked her was, "What color did you get, Grace?" but before Grace could answer, David said disappointedly, "She got green again. Can you believe it?" "But green is good, no?"

When David told me this I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. Kindergarten is a major time of learning new things....for all of us.