Kindergarten - 100 Days of School

For Elias' 100th day of Kindergarten, all the kids in his class were invited to make and wear t-shirts with 100 items on them.

Elias chose googly eyes on a blue shirt.

Here he is posing with a few of his fellow Kinders:

Man, those 100 days went by fast but not nearly as quickly as the 80 or so that followed, especially since this is right around the time Daphne started daycare. More about that in a separate post. Coming up: fun with a heart motif!

Kindergarten - extracurricular activities (part 3)

Okay, so turns out I wrote about the major holidays last year (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas) and there wasn't a whole lot more to report in terms of school-sanctioned celebrations.

So let's just move right along to extracurricular activities.

We made cupcakes for the bake sale at the Harvest Fest, the school's main fundraising event held at the beginning of the year. As a first-time co- room parent I felt the timing was less than ideal, but I figure I'll be less shocked when the event comes around this year, just weeks into the school year.

For this year's ArtSPARK, a fundraising event hosted by the school between Thanksgiving and Christmas (a fundraiser because they auction off artwork donated by local artists), the theme was "up, up, and away" and Elias decided he wanted to make a flying hamburger. So we did and I wrote all about it on my more crafty blog.

I guess it was kinda his first art show? I'll admit it was one of those projects that probably had way more of my assistance than is ideal, but he had such a specific idea of what he wanted to make, I just couldn't help but facilitate. For his science project, on the other hand, when he quickly lost interest, I told him we could save what we'd done for next year. So hopefully I struck a good balance of helping him realize his goals this first year of "real school" without doing all the hard work for him.

As I mentioned in one of the earlier Kindergarten posts, Elias was in a part-time after-school program for the first few months of the year, with the idea that those two days would be my solid work days once Daphne started daycare after her first birthday. Even though the kids would get outside each day, it's a mostly sedentary, indoor program, and that was one of the hardest parts about this first year of school - getting used to being inside, sitting, for most of the day after spending at least half of the day outside during preschool. He's got a lot of physical energy to burn between 3 and 5 or so. When I picked him up around 5 he'd have this weird mix of mental exhaustion coupled with a lot of bottled up physical energy. Not a good mix. But in the meantime, he made this cool superhero self-portrait for the programs semi-annual showcase!

Hooray for new friends! We only stayed in good touch with a couple of kids from preschool, sadly, considering none of us actually moved (and his best buddy from preschool recently moved back east). But man, it's really challenging to hang out with kids outside of your kid's school! Anyway, here he is with Finn, one of his best buddies from Kindergarten who will also be in his 1st grade class, which is helping to ease some of those back-to-school anxieties after what has been a pretty fun-filled summer.

This school has monkey bars, too. Phew. I think I'll wrap this one up here and save the 100 days project, Valentines, etc., for separate posts. Stay tuned - hopefully I'll manage to finish this series of posts before 1st grade starts!

Kindergarten - settling in (part 2)

It's funny, I don't feel like I really settled into a solidly comfortable routine with school until toward the end of the year, perhaps because Daphne was changing so much each month, and I "went back to work" (more about that later) about half-way through the year but ironically pulled Elias from his two days of the after-school program at that time. I feel like every few weeks something shifted or changed with at least one member of the family. To that end, Neal traveled in one-week chunks for work for three weeks total over those first couple of months of school. Managing the shift from a long, leisurely, flexible preschool day to a slightly shorter day with specific drop-off and pick-up times, trying to get little sister down for two naps within those 5 to 6 hours, and realizing quickly on that Elias would need a solid block of burning off all that energy between the end of his school day and dinner time, and doing all this solo off and on, was, well, challenging. I didn't anticipate the Kindergarten learning curve for parents! Oh, and I volunteered to be co- room parent with another gal who is the mother of one of the kids who turned out to be one of Elias' best buddies this past year. So, yeah.

Anyway, here are a couple of images from those first couple of months of settling in:

Ah, construction. I'm not sure what the city of Oakland is up to, but they've been working on it for over a year now. When I drove to the school earlier this week to register Elias for the coming year and find out who his 1st grade teacher would be, the road I usually turn down was totally blocked off and half of the street parallel to school was filled with construction trucks, cones, etc. Awesome!

The first project on the hallway bulletin board. At this point, apparently, Elias liked library time best. Elias is wearing that same shirt in so many of the images from the first couple of months, as well as in this video where he's performing the goodbye song they sang at the end of each school day:



Elias' only homework this first year of school was to read or be read to each night for 15 to 20 minutes (something we do anyway) and, once each week, to draw a picture, preferably with a story to go along with it, in his "homework book" - one of the items in the backpack that was stolen from our car one afternoon outside martial arts practice toward the end of the school year.

Yep, I was pretty bummed. Fortunately I took pictures of several pages as we went along and he still had a towering pile of projects by June.

A cool community art project that lines the fence around the school's garden, one of the enrichment programs paid for by parents' donations to the school. In addition to garden (and reading/writing & math, of course), the school offers art, science, library, motor skills, and PE. PE is offered just once a week every other week which is insane to me. These kids need at least an hour of PE every day. But that's a topic for a whole 'nother blog post...

Bike day! Bike day is fuzzy because it was at the beginning of the year but there were a handful of weekend events like this at the school throughout the year. The school has a pretty active and yet fairly laidback parent/volunteer community, which is one thing I do really like about the school. Most people who go to this school love it. I haven't quite fallen in love with it but there are some pretty important things I appreciate about it and this is one of them.

Bathtime shenanigans. Neal typically handles 99% of Elias' bedtime routine ever since we added Daphne to the mix, but this must've been one of the nights he was out of town during those first few weeks of school. Ah, the final stretch of a long day of solo parenting...Up next, holiday shenanigans!

Kindergarten - part 1 (of many)

We have a rising 1st grader on our hands! School starts on Monday so I thought it was high time I write about Elias' first year of "real school." I was going to write one epic, photo-heavy post but have decided instead to write a multi-part series of posts all about Kindergarten. First up, first day:

Obligatory posed pictures solo and with various family members:

Elias has changed and grown quite a bit in the past year, but man, so has his little sister!

The entire fam' accompanied Elias to school that first day:

We lingered after drop-off for a few additional shots - his cubby for the year:

Elias at his seat, waiting for his first day to begin:

He moved groups once or twice over the course of the year. Overall that first day wasn't nearly as emotional for me, or for him, for that matter, as I thought it might be. And that doesn't surprise me, about Elias at least. So far he's been very matter-of-fact when it comes to transitions like this, not getting too emotional about the transition from daycare to preschool, or from preschool to Kindergarten. He talks about past teachers and buddies often but just isn't that sad to move on. And frankly, neither was I. Our last couple of months of preschool were a little rough around the edges. We worried that the transition to Kindergarten would be a difficult 6 to 8 week period not unlike his first couple of months of preschool, but in hindsight I think Elias was acting out at preschool because he was bored and ready to move on. But more about the first weeks of Kindergarten in my next post...