School days

Edith is loving pre-K. Never mind that it's the same place she has been for four years, that she was enrolled there all summer, that the 3- and 4-year-old classes do many activities together. We turned the corner into fall, her official teacher is the pre-K teacher, and she is now in the oldest group at the school...and she loves it. Knock on wood, but she's coming home full of enthusiastic stories every day about what she did, what was interesting, and what she learned. We relish the tidbits: She was line leader for the first week of school, which is her favorite job assignment. (Who knew? But it is a seminary preschool, so the last shall be first, and the line leader's job on arriving at a door is to hold it open for all the others to file through ahead of her.) There's a new kid whose name she is uncertain about--Micah? or Michael? Are they both real names? Now that winter is coming we don't just wave our hands briefly under the faucet la-di-da...we sing the whole alphabet song while washing, and then we know we're done. Do you know what a volcano is? It looks like a mountain, and it's kind of like that, except there is a hole at the top, and lava comes out and flows out and gets hard. Do you know how to make lowercase a? Edith will show you--she has been practicing at rest time. Actually, she has been having her teacher write out messages she dictates, then she spends the time copying them.

A major emphasis of the first two weeks has been colors. On the first day of this unit I got an enthusiastic gush about it in the car, "Oh, Mom, it was so cool!..." After receiving a lesson in color theory, I persuaded her to tell Tom about it again when he came home from the gym.



For her part, Alice is trying hard to talk to us. She's using a few deliberate signs that she must have picked up at school, but since they all look like a version of waving a hand in front of her horizontally, we're not sure what they mean...except for "all done." She also really likes repeating the word baby and the phrase baby Alice, which comes out bah-bee-Ah. I have no idea if she knows what it means.

Alice went from being the only non-walker in her class to the only mobile kid in her class, when everyone else from summer session moved up to the young toddler class. She apparently gets a workout crawling around to investigate the new babies in their bouncy chairs and cribs. And when the teachers feel she needs a bit more activity than her younger classmates, they send her out to the playground with her former buddies, now in the toddler class. I love that the school is small and flexible enough to make that possible. Even if it means she needs a bath every night!