Leaping Llamas

"What is that animal?" the teacher asked her first-graders, pointing to a black-and-white illustration in their workbooks.

"A sheep!" someone called out.

"It does kind of look like a sheep," she acknowledged.

"A llama!" suggested another.

I giggled because a llama was not something I ever would have guessed. But even though the school was less than three miles from my grandparents' house, the kids in the class were from a much different background than mine. All but one were multilingual learners, most speaking Spanish at home and English at school. (Also, llamas are a lot more ubiquitous today.)

The teacher laughed too. "It's actually a goat," she told her class. "And do you know what we call a baby goat?" She waited, but hearing no volunteers, continued, "A kid!"

Many of the students looked blankly.

"You know, like sometimes we call children kids," she said. "You're kids, and a baby goat is a kid, too." She smiled. "Now, what does this kid do?" she asked, pointing to the word "jumps" on the handwriting line beneath the picture.

"El niño salta," whispered one boy to the girl next to him, hopping up and down in his seat a bit.

He does indeed.