"and her name is Minnie"

I lied to little kids at Jr. Achievement Day in San Francisco.

I volunteered at this work function where employees go to an elementary school and teach a class of kids K thru 5. It was my first time, and I only helped out because they were in dire need of people. I picked a class where they had a seasoned and experienced volunteer, Jorge, who had done this Jr. Achievement program about 9 times or so. I also made sure that it was a K class. Kids 5 and under, and kids shorter that I.

I didn't really know what Jr. Achievement was until this morning about 20 minutes before the class started. The program is all about teaching kids about economics and business. The K kids are taught about economics and the individual. The older kids learn about ecomonics within their family, the community, and their city, blah blah.

A lot of what we did today was read to the kids and have them do little exercises to reinforce a theme. The first story was about trade and how a kid goes to a farm. Eventually, he trades eggs for butter which then gets made into bread. We did exercises with stickers of quarters and pennies and such.

We also did an activity where the kids had to draw their favorite animal. The activity starts out with the volunteer, me, drawing my favorite animal and telling why the animal is my favorite. I panicked a little. I can't draw, and I really hoped that what I drew would be recognizable. I was so darn happy when one of the little girls recognized that I had drawn a cat. But, then I lied. I told all about my favorite animal Minnie(don't tell Daisy) and how "she" was 16 years old. I didn't want to get in to the gender issues so that's why I lied.

The kids then got to draw their favorite animal. It was funnny, but they all picked cats. It was so cute. Ealier in the day, I realized that these small kids were little copy cats. We had asked them what their favorite part of school was and all of them replied "playing". So anyway, all these kids were drawing cats, and I was so touched. When we left, we got all kinds of sweet hugs. What a fun day.

And by the way, can you guess which cat was mine?