On the Phone

I walked out of a fundraiser tonight around 8 pm and turned on my phone to find THREE phone messages. Who left me so many messages? I scrolled through a mental list of who might have that urgent of a reason to get a hold of me on a Tuesday night--grandma in the hospital? Nate didn't know where I was? Agent calling to say someone wants to publish me?

Nope--they were all from children and all about tonight's homework. There are varying degrees, among seven- or eight-year-olds, of phone-message-leaving effectiveness. One of the messages was from Denaia who took two tries to leave a message--the first a bit of background noise and a hang-up, the second her actual message. Michaela closed out her message by not only providing her phone number but by repeating it to make sure I'd gotten it. Neither, however, left her name. This, as I have found nearly every single time a child calls, is just not within in the scope of elementary phone messages. Most phone calls I receive from children go pretty much as follows:

Me: “Hello?”

Student: “What page did we have to do for the math homework?”

I am left to guess the caller’s identity. After doing so, I often teach an impromptu
mini-lesson on polite phone call openers. A further complicating factor in navigating the challenging terrain of telephone protocol is encountering voicemail. It is very difficult to leave a phone message when you’re eight. I still chuckle about Ka'Von's series of messages one year, guided by his mom in the background!

Anyone have any good kid phone message quotes?