Summer Begins, Even if it IS 60 Degrees

According to the school calendar, summer begins today. It’s been an interesting year, as the parent of a first grader. The benefit of having a child in school, to me, is relearning everything myself. For example, did you know the Sun is really a nearby star made of mostly gas? I did, but it was interesting to hear it from my daughter, who spent the second half of the year falling in love with science.

Already, some of the math that comes home perplexes me. There is some kind of exercise they do, where a number goes in one spot, gets transitioned and comes out in another spot. Too many times, I just want to write the problem out the way I did it in school instead of messing with these “new” learning methods. Sometimes, I just feel old, in a “what is a pencil and paper?” sort of way.

Our goal to work on over the summer is reading, reading, and some more reading, mixed in with some math facts.

If you send your kids to school expecting the school to take care of every learning need, unless you’ve got an exceptionally Einstein kid, you’re in for some sad-looking report cards, in my opinion. In first grade, not only is the learning graded, but so are the social skills. Mine kept running like a crazy person down the hallway, according to teacher reports (stay in line and listen to instructions) and kept running into people in the classroom (be aware of your personal space and avoid running into others).

Apparently, no matter what, she is always in a hurry to get from Spot A to Spot B.

Kindergarten, it turns out, was a holiday compared to first grade. I’m looking forward to all of the wonderful things we’ll learn in second grade. Just please spare me the geometry. 🙂

The Little Mathemetician

Our daughter’s parent-teacher conferences were tonight. She’s in first grade. After looking through her writing assignments, spelling, reading, science, etc., her teacher says how great she is at math.

I told her that’s a very good thing to be good at. Some day, she’ll be able to add numbers for me, since I need a calculator to add 2 plus 2. 🙂

I enjoy the writing assignments the most. One was about a picnic (a story of one of our camping trips), where she said, “I cook marshmallows at night, and eat hot dogs in the morning.” Ok, then. I must have missed that one.

My favorite so far had to do with how dad likes to play girly games. It started out as a nice story about how dad likes to sit with her and read and play board games with her. Which are mostly girly, but he likes them.

lol

Then there was the one about sledding with my mom, but my dad stays home because he has two new knees. 🙂

Parent Teacher Conferences

Last night, we attended conferences for first grade at The Little Kid’s school. It was overwhelming to hear about the expectations for first graders. For example, they’re expected to write a paragraph containing a main idea, three pieces of fact about the main topic, and some type of closing sentence showing their feeling about the topic.

We got to see an example of this. I saw where TLK was attempting to put the paragraph together and was thinking it through, but didn’t know a lot of the words’ spelling. I asked, “Is she expected to know all of these words?”. I mean, there is a lot of red ink here in the form of spelling corrections. “No, only the words we’ve learned so far, but we’re beginning to look things up in the dictionary, too.”

Overall, the scores were good. She does love math, which makes me wonder if she was perhaps switched at the hospital. 🙂 She got an “E” for “exceeds expectations” where her penmanship was concerned. “She is careful and does it right, consistantly.”

We have a few things to work on… reading faster (they actually TIME words read per minute) and paying attention during science. It’s funny, though. When I ask her things at home, she knows them, but at school, sometimes she doesn’t. I’ll have to talk to her about that.

When Good First-Day-of-School-Days Go Bad

So, I had good intentions. There was a new outfit and new shoes. There was the mix for French Toast sitting in the fridge, just waiting to be her breakfast. I was prepared to make the first day of 1st Grade good.

TLK wakes in a tearful display. She doesn’t want to wear the new outfit. Fine, get out of bed and wear whatever you want. The tears don’t stop.

“What is wrong?”

There is a list:
“I don’t want to go to First Grade”
“I won’t be in a classroom with Rylea and Alicia!”
“I won’t ever see you again.”
“I want to stay with YOU!”

Ummm… Where I am going is boring. You wouldn’t like it. I will see you after school, just as I have every day since you stepped or crawled out of the house.

“I want to wear my flip flops”. and, the best ever, if you’re a person who is not a morning person and does not enjoy rushing around to actually make breakfast on a work day:

“I’m not hungry!”

LOL. I understand emotions. I have plenty of my own.

And really, it was just one more piece of french toast for the dog.

How do you think she’ll be when I pick her up? Laughing, I imagine, and full of wonderful details of her day, along with plenty of lovely paperwork for me to complete.

You know, this is starting to sound like my first day of work! 🙂

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