School Updates

Since he's looking at the camera we'll start with him.

After two weeks of school he's doing great.  His teacher keeps (she's written 3) writing me notes with how impressed she is with his math skills and how bright he is over all.

Either she's managing me or she really is impressed and either way I can read them to D and his face lights up when he thinks she's noticing him so positively.  It's a good confidence boost for him and hopefully encourages more participation at school.  He has not had social problems yet.  His class has mostly stayed together for the last three years which I don't love.  But he has built in buddies.  And his two good friends (one is in his class the other is in the class next door) play well together at recess.

So, so far, he's doing great.

G man.  Harder to say.  It took about all of the last month for him to get used to going back to school all day.  Using his brain.  Having homework.  Now he's in a groove I'm not meeting as much resistance with the homework.  But I did talk to a friend who said she isn't even making hers do the homework.  But point of note: second grade is when they actually are graded.  I am not sure this parent realizes that and I'm not going to be the one to tell her.

They still haven't sent home guided reading yet.  Supposedly this week.  The reading thing always is where we have to work the hardest.  The math comes easy for him (so far).  He does his work on his own without much input from me.  He does his math facts from memory in under the 3min time (or close to it).  I don't ever hear much about science, social studies, health or anything.  There's no homework for those things.  Only reading and math.  And reading is such a tricky wicket.  We practice.  We read every night without fail.  Even if it's just one of his "readers" (which are these).  I try to get him to read chapters of Magic Treehouse (we just did #17 - we've gone in order - about the Titanic).  He enjoys those because they are about factual things.  We also enjoys Junie B Jones.  I placed an order for The Weird School series through scholastic (with the hope of getting books for his teacher).  We'll see how that one goes.  The tricky wicket part of reading ... while it's part work, I would like him to see the fun in it as well.  Which is sometimes hard.  As this is our third year it's going much better.  But it also helps that I made him read all summer long.  Every night.  Now it's just expected.

But if his guided reading is harder than what we've been doing ...

Which brings us to this one.

School is going very well.  No tears.  She is excited to go and loves music, bible and dance.  She is napping there.  Which is a huge bonus and huge help to me as Tuesday's are baseball and Thursdays are soccer.  She has to stay up.

It is much easier to drop her off when she goes so easily.

But alone in this house I still hear babies.  I look around for the baby monitor at least twice.  I think I hear them.  I am still not used to it, this being our third week.  I still don't have a great schedule for myself and I messaged the two other "room moms" asking if the class needed anything and was told no.

I already started redoing Julia's room to prep her for her big girl bed.  I keep going back and forth on when to do it.

They get bigger every day.

In other news I'm mostly through The Crown on Netflix and it's a good watch.  I like Claire Foy from her days on Upstairs Downstairs and Wolf Hall.