Every Friday at school Siena gets a half-hour session with a program called Happy Feet. They try to get the kids to do all sorts of various physical activities. There are three things we really love about this program:
- They help to teach kids basic socio-educational skills, like how to wait your turn and how to be still and listen to the teacher. If we’re going to get Siena to kindergarten on our target timetable, she’ll need to know these things!
- If she behaves well, she gets one or two stamps on her hands. Not only is it a source of conversation when she gets home (“I got a stamp!”) but it gives us an indication of how she’s doing.
- And most importantly (at this moment), she learns a variety of new and exciting physical activities to do, and when she shows us something we’ve never seen before, it provides an endless source of amazement and pride for us.
Some of the moves she’s learned at Happy Feet:
- Hopping like a frog, in conjunction with saying “ribbit, ribbit”
- Doing a crab walk
- And just this week, Siena showed us how she curtsies.
The curtsey was especially rewarding, as at first she told me, “I’m going to show you a curtsey,” and I didn’t have any idea what she was saying. I watched her put one leg behind the other, bend down a little, almost fall over, and grab onto sometihng. Not only didn’t I know what she was saying, but I had no clue what she was trying to do. Then she executed it again without the falling part, and I exclaimed, “You’re curtseying!”
So despite the extortionary fees of this program, we love it anyway. And I suppose the #4 reason for loving the program is that it prepares us for being recurringly extorted in this manner for the rest of our lives.