Do you remember kindergarten? If you don’t remember much, Natalie Goldberg says that’s okay. Begin from there and start writing.
In one her workshops, she assigned third grade as a prompt. One person wrote about how he had missed third grade entirely because he was in Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp. He did not talk about the concentration camp. Instead, he talked about what he had missed from third grade, the things he didn’t learn. It was mesmerizing. She says,
“We had heard of the horror of the camps but to distill it down to a loss of third grade grammar and history had a startling effect. We felt the pain in a new way.”
Write about a grade (or an age) in your life? What did you miss? What was extraordinary?
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What is so interesting to me about this picture is that I have a picture from my kindergarten and both of my children’s kindergartens that look exactly like this except that they are in color. Hmmmmmm. . . clones?
Do you know that my kindergarten class was in the local newspaper because we had 5 Lisa’s!?
The picture did cause a double-take. Almost took a moment to see if I was in it.
I had a picture like this too. Guess it’s a good one for kindergarten.
That must be the quintessential kindergarten picture. It was something else in the post, though, that had me writing almost immediately, about a year I missed, but didn’t miss at all. (Now I’m stumbling around a bit uncertainly, seeing if I still know how to post.)
Karen, go to Site Admin at the bottom right corner to write a blog post. Can’t wait to read it!
Found myself looking for familiar faces too!
My head is reeling with thoughts of what to post…there is something special about each grade level that distinguishes each passing year as different from the ones that preceded and followed.