fav. student moments as of late

Sidetracking from my family's visit and travels for a bit...

The students have been cracking me up lately! I love the small, unexpected moments that make me laugh with them... kids are pretty awesome.

One elementary boy told me that he had eaten Korean soup over the Winter Break... and it had red broth the color of my hair. The noodles were "the curly-kind noodles"... just like my hair. So... when he was eating his soup, he kept thinking that he was "eating Ms. Stacia's hair!" Hahaha.

...It reminded me of the child in Vietnam when I first arrived, who called my hair, Noodle Hair.

And it does seem fitting... especially in one of my favorite photos (taken by my friend Marc Hughes from Denver at a past Crawfish Broil get-together). Marc took a great photo of me and my good friend, Andy Lynes... and then I cartoonized this bit of it:

Yes, I can see the "curly-kind noodles!"

ALSO - a favorite moment of my first week of 2014 back in school... an Italian kindergartener, who is pretty fluent in English as well, made me laugh out loud at this one:

We were reading a story and the end had a comment about mustard. (Mo Willems' book, The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog!) Most of the students did not know what mustard was... so I said,

"Come si dice 'mustard' in Italiano?" (How do you say 'mustard' in Italian?)

"...Senape..."

And we discussed a bit about what it is like... most of the kids got it by then...

One boy pipes up --> "Ms. Stacia! ...I am an EXXXXSSSPERT in Italian! ...Because I was born in Italy!"

The way he said it... and with such enthusiasm... AND the fact that he used the word expert to describe his level of proficiency in his first language... made me crack up. I loved it. Kids are awesome.