On one hand, I am so excited for her. She is ready! She needs the challenge and she is going to an amazing school. We have chosen a magnet school for Emily. This has been a long process for me and Jeff. We have a great home school but wanted to research all of our options to make the best decision for Emily. We looked at all the magnet choices, charter schools and our home school. When we went to visit this school we LOVED it. We talked to everyone we could who had ever sent their child to this school or a similar one and finally decided that this was a wonderful opportunity for Emily. She is going to a school that will give her an opportunity to learn in a very "hands on" way. She will learn to work together with others in a groups. This school really tries to meet each individual child where they are and they teach children responsibility and natural consequences. She will also get 90 minutes of "specials" a day. This includes art, music, violin or keyboards, dance and PE. Each class has a garden that they plant and take care of and then they learn to prepare what they have grown in a kitchen. She will be in a K-1 class and will loop and have the same teacher again next year. We are so excited for her!
On the other hand, my baby is going to kindergarten. No more preschool years for me. This starts a new chapter in her childhood and in our parenthood. I have to give away a lot of control and trust others to do the best thing for my girl. It is hard in many ways! I will miss her every day!
We have spent a lot of time preparing for this day. We have read books about kindergarten. We have counted down the days on her calendar and we have been doing lots of fun things as a family and with friends. I will blog about those adventures on a different day. We have also been to visit her new school several times. We went by a few weeks ago to check out the class lists that were posted. This was Emily's first opportunity to see her new school. I showed her around and we played on the playground. Then the next week they had a new families picnic. Then last Monday they had a kindergarten tea. They scheduled the children in groups of 6 and they went in the classroom for about 30 minutes for a tour and "tea" (lemonade) and cookies. This was Emily's first opportunity for her to meet her teachers. We had heard wonderful things about the whole team of teachers especially her "main" teacher, I will call her Ms. M. Ms. M did not disappoint! She was lovely and Emily LOVED her right away. Here they are getting ready to go to the classroom.
Here she is outside her school after the tea.
Then we had open house on Thursday. It was a great night. It was good to see the student body as a whole. We saw more of the school and met many of her "specials" teachers. I joined the PTA and signed up to volunteer for almost everything:) We also bought some spirit wear. We now have 3 new school t-shirts.
Oh, I almost forgot school supply shopping. We printed off her list and Emily made a school supply list for her dolls and we were off to go shopping! I was excited about this. I used to LOVE shopping for school supplies.
After all that hard work Emily decided to take a reading break.
The week before school started was filled with lots of fun activities, as I said before, but it was also a hard week for Emily. On Monday, after the tea, she got stung by a yellow jacket:( Those stings hurt a lot! The next day she had to have her 5 year old shots (4 shots). Bless her heart, she made it through!
Emily has not been herself the last few days. She has been very emotional about random things. I think she is nervous about her first day of kindergarten. She told me today that she is afraid she won't make friends and she wants to go back to her preschool. I reminded her that all of her preschool friends are starting kindergarten too. We have given her lots of love and time this week and we have assured her that she is going to LOVE school but it's okay to be a little scared. We have also reminded her that Jesus will go with her to kindergarten and He will help through the day. She wants to listen to her VBS music on the way to school tomorrow to remind her that Jesus is with her:)
I am sad, happy, excited, nervous all at the same time! I'm actually ready for this first day to be over but I want to enjoy every moment of it!
No comments:
Post a Comment