The Assignment

Put five things into a paper bag that will tell the class something about yourself. What you like to do, what you read, your favorite movie, snack, etc. This is one of those assignments that Hanna can do or at least she should be able to do this but she is making it much more a task than it needs to be.

Hanna wants to be like her "friends'. In reality she is not there by any means and she will never get there either God willing. This assignment is a demonstration of how far off base her social skills really are. I know that the sixth, seventh, and eight grade level kids are all over the place with their social skills as they are maturing at very different rates, but Hanna is not even on the radar here.

In her paper bag she put a Groovy Girl, we will let that go as some girls at this age still are playing with their dolls and some are collecting them because they are not yet ready to let them go. A deck of Go Fish cards. I let those stay even though they are far below this age group and Hanna plays that game almost daily.She then added The Strawberry Shortcake DVD. We have many DVD`s here that she enjoys and are more appropriate. Her favorite movie is Chicken Little which is a little closer to appropriate then The Strawberry Shortcake movie. Next she came with her favorite book and I know it is her favorite because it is one of the board books where she can look at the pictures and "read" it because the pictures are showing what the words are saying. It is the My Little Pony Rainbow Day board book for kids about eighteen months old. We do have a joke book that she likes people to read to her and she has gotten an American Girl miniature book that she enjoys, but according to Hanna neither of them will work because she can not read them. The last thing the Mom thought of. I carefully opened a bag of M&M`s, let her eat them and then gave her the empty wrapper to put in her bag. She can not bring that, it is just an empty wrapper. When I tried to explain that it would show the kids that she likes M&M`s she just could not see how that would work without the candy there. I am not going to let her bring one bag of M&M`s into a sixth grade classroom and with all of her food issues I do not believe that they would even make it to school before being consumed.

This is the mess one little girl can make of a simple brown paper bag project, just think of all the work that is going into getting this little thing done and then you can only begin to understand what happens when she needs to do things that are more complicated. She defiantly creates enough challenges for us.