What's the earliest thing you can remember?

The earliest thing I can still remember is from when I was probably less than 18 months... I woke up, climbed out of my crib, and went downstairs to find my mom, so I could ask her what I had been doing the day before, so I could get back to it.

What's the earliest memory you still have?

I vaguely remember my fourth birthday. I had a Snoopy ice cream cake from Baskin-Robbins.

Other than that I have spotty memory from ten until high school.

I have some vague recollections of when I was about 2.
Mostly, throwing my dads favorite baseball glove in the pool.
He was . . . less than happy.

My grandpa having a heart attack when I was four.

I had a cheerful childhood.

I remember looking out a window from a crib in a house we moved out of before I turned one, so that's pretty good I suppose. I remember two third-degree burn incidents and a poisoning before I turned two...

Being treated for diaper rash.

So I was probably thirteen or fourteen.

I don't remember anything before Kindergarten, and even that was just one day. The people sitting at my table got to line up at the door first, so on that day I had friends.

Running around naked in the summer when I was 2 years old in North Carolina.

i can remember tornado drills at my elementary school. when i was bout 5 or 6. also remember being shuffled off to the neighbors house when my dad came home drunk.....around the same age

also being attacked by my aunts german shephard when i was 4...even remember the sheet going over my face when they sewed me up

So, not much has changed then, eh? Just age and location

We never out grow some things

When I was in kindergarten, all of our arrangements were alphabetically, so at nap time, I was in between the two cutest girls in my class

In Kindergarden I refused to nap. It was just as well because I had my swim lessons during nap time. It was awesome getting picked up from school in the van and brought to my lessons then brought back just in time for snacks!

My class only had 5 girls, and they all hung out together. And I don't know if we even HAD a naptime. We only went half-days.

hard to say. i'm pretty sure the earliest memory i have is my dad tossing mom over the couch, but i have vague impressions of a waterbed that i think are earlier. they divorced before i turned two, making that quite early indeed. (things pretty much went uphill from there, so the memory isn't particularly troublesome.)

Speaking of half days. . . I don't get it. I went full time with the rest of the grades. Why the hell can't kindergardeners go full time now? Granted, I went to a parochial school, but still. What the fuck.

They do in most places. But the hold up is the money it costs. You have to double the number of kindergarten classroom seats and teachers to have full day kindergarten.

I think the reasoning is that there is a point of critical mass, so to speak, where children that young can only absorb so much useful information at a sitting before their brains just switch over to spazz mode.

Why? All those same kids will graduate to first grade and go for the full day? I don't get what the difference is in the number of kids since they'll all move on. Only going for 3 hours a day (that's what they go for here) is just plain retarded and a waste of gas going to and from school, especially when there is another child in an upper grade in said school and you have to make the round trip three times a day.

That's why we had lunch, nap time, snack time, and recess. After that, it was back to work. Of course, down there in LA, they were also teaching us french in second grade. Go figure.

Waking up at 4:21 am to turn off the computer while listening to music.

Say you have 5 kindergarten teachers in your school for half day kindergarten. If you make it full day kindergarten, you have to then have ten teachers to handle the same amount of children. Ten teachers = $300 - 900,000. If you spread that out over an entire school district it's ten to thirty million dollars. And that is just for the teachers, that doesn't take into consideration the classrooms, or free lunch, etc. Part of the no child left behind crap was making all kindergarten full day, but of course it is entirely dependent on funding.

Yeah but ALL of those kids will move up to first grade. If there are 5 first grade teachers what's the difference? You're still going to have to group toe morning and afternoon students together for their full days of 1st grade.

The difference is the five extra teachers you need for the kindergartners. The first grade teachers were already there, but the kindergarten teachers are not. No matter how you look at it it's still five extra people you have to hire and another five classrooms you have to find.

If you need five teachers for half day kindergarten, that's ten classes they teach in a day. If you make it full day, you still have to teach those other five classes worth of kids.

Actually, that would be one thing I would agree with. Foreign languages are most easily assimilated at an early age.

Really, it's best to expose a newborn to as many different sounds and languages as possible. When we're born, we can pick-up on all the different phonemes that can possibly be expressed by human-kind. As we grow-up, our brain learns to filter out, and eventually completely ignore phonemes that are not used often.

It's why there is the stereotype of Japanese people confusing L and R sounds... in Japanese, there is no distinction between these two sounds and it leans more heavily towards the R pronunciation, so when older individuals speak a language with L in it, it slurs as an R.

Conversely, many Asian languages have an NG sound that simply does not exist in most European languages, and we have a horrible time pronouncing it.