Toddler-speak works well on Twitter.
Short declarative bursts of nonsense. Questions that border on absurd. Crankiness. While some fictional little personas, like @HonestToddler and irisgrim, make excellent use of the medium to spread their bedtime-defying, unbroken-cracker-loving gospel, Leslie McCollom's feed, @PreschoolGems, is special because her quotes come from whole classes full of boys and girls under the age of six.
McCollom, a preschool teacher from Portland, Ore., shares funny comments and drawings from her students with more than 160,000 followers regularly -- and she has recently published a book featuring some of their best quotes.
McCollom told HuffPost Parents that she was originally "so amazed at the crazy things students were saying" that she started keeping paper lists. Friends then told her she should share the quips more widely -- which, of course, she did.
If her school seems like particularly fertile ground for crazy kid talk, it may have something to do with Portland.
"It is essentially a mini-Portlandia, full of tiny eccentrics, with the freedom to formulate their own unique world views and discover commonalities in one another," she wrote on Penguin's Author's Desk blog. "I feel like I happened upon a secret spring over here in the Pacific Northwest that puts forth only the freshest and finest of kid weirdness."
For example, some of McCollom's favorite preschool gems are "I don't want to be myself anymore because I can't stop eating cheese" and "We will become evil and the stars will come alive." We've collected 50 more of the ultimate preschool gems below. Click through, vote for the ones you like best -- and let us know if your preschooler has said anything wacky recently in the comments!