Here Comes Second Grade, Goggles On!

It’s going to be a wild ride. Yesterday was the big class list reveal and so far so good. Paley was certainly placed in a whole new environment. I think she carried over just one close friend from last year but she does have a few kinder friends returning to the fold. I think her new class will be a new big adventure. This year we opted to avoid all of the opinions from parents on who is the better teacher. The best advice I can give to any parent starting into kindergarten. We parents are truly bias when it comes to our kids education, our children can do no wrong, that’s it plain and simple. The truth is, each parent makes what they may with their relationship with their child's teacher. We control our child's path and future, it’s up to us to make the best decisions and work with the challenges that we are presented. Now I am not advocating every teacher is perfect, we just need to walk into every situation with new glasses and not let other parents paint them different color to twist our perception of our child's experience. 

Homework is nothing really new! All of our friends at other schools note that homework levels from First to Second grade increases drastically. But when we talk about the amount of work they were getting at Paley’s school, it sounded pretty comparable to what paley got in first grade. The kids in 1st had a homework bag every week with at least 2-3 projects inside. Along with weekly spelling and math worksheets. During Paley’s rehearsals I spoke to 3 different parents about their kids school and that Paley went to Guadalupe, all three responded, in three separate instances with the same comments. “Oh I hear that’s a really good school” & “I hear they get a lot of homework there”. I never realized that our school was that bad or good. 

In talking with parents who made the jump last year, they didn’t see a great flux of homework. They did comment the projects became more detailed or harder. All in all the kids received the same homework and reading that they had the year before. What’s going to be really interesting is to see who Paley will be in class with this year.. Last years her class had a chart of the kids names by which kinder class they came from. If memory serves me correct, her kinder class had the most listed in her First grade class. I have a feeling this year she might be split away from a lot of those kids the second go around of splitting them up. 

I had Paley work a lot on her reading and her online lexia program. What we need to focus on more this year is her math skills. She was not particularly behind, we just need to work on memorizations. What kills me is the odd math skills they are teaching the Core system. Gone are the short cuts of subtracting the from the one’s to increase the tens which leaves you would basic answer. Right now Paley’s main concern is that pesky box the math problems require of the kids. Every problem has the boxes and she get upset because she feels like she has to use the boxes every single time. 

This coming school year is going to be busy for her after school. Between doing the school musical again, she wants to get back into dancing again. I was also able to find a kids yoga class over at Yoga Source. Then there is Girl Scouts, which she will finally move into being a Brownie this year. I am still helping the troop as being the treasurer and hopefully during a few of the meetings. All in all, it will probably just be same thing as last year when it comes to school.

Second Grade photo to follow.