Ione Craig was not just your regular, run-of-the-mill kindergarten teacher. She defined kindergarten teacher. And our daughter Suzanne was fortunate enough to have her. Ione with laughing eyes and smile in her voice made every day an adventure in learning colors or numbers or letters or sounds....
In the fall there was the adventure of gathering leaves of gold and scarlet and orange. There were gourds and pumpkins to paint and line up around the room and songs about the leaves falling down to sing to the rhythm of shakers and tambourines and triangles. There was the taste of fresh apple cider and caramel corn.
At Christmas there were bells to make and to spell and to ring. There was the wooden nativity to set up and cotton balls to paste onto the beards of the cut-out Santas. When the big Indiana snows came, there were new words to write and to spell like s-n-o-w and i-c-e and c-o-l-d. There were icicles to cut from white manilla paper and hang from silver cord across the ceiling. There were new ways to fold and cut paper with newly acquired scissor skills that, when unfolded, made magical snowflakes to tape on the big wall of windows that looked out on the drifts of snow outside.
One winter day when I went to pick Suzanne up from school, there were twenty small bumps and one large round bump in the snowy school yard. Turned out it was Mrs. Craig in her snowmobile suite teaching her kindergarten children to make snow angels in the drifts!
Then there was the day that Suzanne came out with a big smile on her face, waving a very large sheet of fingerpainting paper. She carefully manipulated the paper into the front seat of my car and said, ‘Mom, we fingerpainted today, and guess what we used for paint—chocolate pudding! Mrs. Craig said we could paint with our fingers or our elbows or even our toes, if we wanted to, as long as we licked it off when we got done!” I still have that painting in one of the early scrapbooks I kept for Suzanne, and she still grins when she looks at it.
There were days when I wasn’t able to make the school-run, and Bill was on duty. Invariably, it seemed, just as he was leaving for the school an important phone call would come into the office or an interview would run overtime, making him a bit late to get to the pick-up line. (These were the days before portable cell phones.) By the time he got there, Mrs. Craig had taken Suzanne back inside to wait. About the third time this happened, Suzanne came out with a big note attached to her sweater with a safety pin that said MR. GAITHER on the front. When Bill unpinned the note and read it, it said.
Mr. Gaither:
Kindergarten lets out at 11:30. It is very distressing
to your child when you are not here when she gets
out. I will expect you here at 11:30 from now on.
Ione Craig
It didn’t matter to this teacher whether Mr. Gaither was president of the School Board or President of the United States; she expected him to never distress one of her little students again. When Bill got home that day with our daughter, he said, “What a great teacher! You have to love a teacher whose top priority is the joy and well-being of her kids.” (You may be sure he was never late again.)
We got to know Ione Craig that year and found there were many iconic stories about her around town from the three generations of students who had her as a teacher. But the best story was one she told on herself. She said that by February kindergarteners had learned to write and to spell enough words to write a love note on Valentine’s Day. They could use scissors well enough to cut out red construction paper hearts and could paste well enough to glue lacey paper doilies to the red hearts to make a pretty Valentine.
So Mrs. Craig’s project the second week of February was for the students to make a Valentine for a very special person in their lives. To her surprise and delight, one of the little boys came up at the end of the morning and gave his Valentine to his teacher. Mrs. Craig expressed her gratitude to her student and tucked the treasure into her purse to take home to show her husband. When they opened the Valentine, it read:
After reading this, Armond Craig laughed out loud and said, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with the kid’s spelling. He just can’t count.”
