Golden Eagles are the premium in-game currency in the video game, War Thunder, that I’ve been playing this fall with David, Ed, Tyler Rust, Ross, and occasional other California friends. The game is free to play, but Golden Eagles cost real dollars. They allow you to purchase special upgrade and other “premium” content that you don’t get if you’re taking the budget route.
I talk about the game from time to time in class meetings with my 8th graders, usually to make some point about perseverance, learning from failure, or to illustrate design thinking concepts like iteration and prototyping. Video game analogies are always popular, especially with a particular segment of students who are not otherwise prone to paying too much attention at these sorts of gatherings.
All of this background to understand this student holiday card. It included a Barnes and Noble gift card with the following scrawled note:
“Sorry but I don’t think Barnes and Noble sells Golden Eagles…”
Golden Eagles (5000 would cost $24.99 today at the Gaijin store… and they’re not, alas, sold at B&N)
I received the most awesome gift from Griffin yesterday after school: a hand-written note that he spent 70 (!!!!) minutes composing and writing. My heart is bursting! It reads:
Dear Mom, Thank you for the notes. They make me feel good. I love you, momo. I want to make granola.
<I write him notes in his lunchbox everyday, and that day, we planned to make granola after school.>
Everything below is in Griffin’s words. It’s a bit stream-of-consciousness, but we just asked him to talk about Kindergarten. Occasionally we prompted him to give further details. – Andrew & Sarah
The bus stop.Maggie was there to see Griffin off on his big adventure.
I like the puzzle maps. They are maps but they are puzzles: Africa, United States, and the other one that kind of looks like Africa (“South America?” “Uh-huh!”).
The trinomial and binomial cubes are boxes with blocks inside them and you try to match the pattern on top of the box.
Reading while waiting for the bus.
I like the reading corner because it has a chair and there are two reading corners, one in the back of the room and one in the front of the room. I like the the one that’s up high with the stairs to go up, in the front of the room. I like to read the garden books and I like the pretend books and I like sitting in the reading corner too. There is only one garden book; it’s like a pretend garden and it goes all over the roof and he goes through it. It has lots of white flowers and yellow ones too. The pretend books are not real so like they are real books but they are not real people and stuff.
I like the computers too in the multi-purpose room. We try to match words sometimes.
We eat with silverware and sometimes our fingers. We have lots of tables which we have to set up. We sing this song before we eat:
For the golden corn and the apples on the tree,
for the golden butter and the honey for our tea,
for fruits and nuts and berries that grow along the way,
for birds and bees and flowers, we give thanks every day.
We also have another song that we sing at the rug:
Choo choo choo choo,
Choo choo choo choo,
Going up the tracks,
Choo choo choo choo,
Choo choo choo choo,
Then we come right back.
First we go to Malaya’s house,
Then we go to James’s house,
Then we go to Crosby’s house,
Then we go to Tegan’s house.
Choo choo choo choo,
Choo choo choo choo,
Going up the tracks,
Choo choo choo choo,
Choo choo choo choo,
Then we come right back.
First we go to Griffin’s house,
Then we go to Harrison’s house,
Then we go to Serenity’s house…
We keep singing like that until we go to everyone’s house.
The play structure! I love recess. Now we go on the play structure. The grass is medium new and medium not-new. The play structure is new; it was already built when I started school but the grass was new so we played out back instead of in the front. We like to play and tag and in the sand box. I like playing on the play structure too. We get to go outside every day, except when it is raining or super super cold.
I like my teacher Kristen and also Angela and Corinne, my side teachers. Angela passes out the food and she speaks Spanish.
I miss my sister when I go to school. It is a long day; I sometimes get tired.
When I get home, I like to snuggle with Maggie and also I say, “Hello Mommy and Daddy” if Daddy is home. I like to play with Maggie and when Mama and Daddy make dinner we like to play.
