A Good Day

I am just now getting around to posting an update about the kids' first day of first grade yesterday. Despite Emily's rough morning at drop-off, she ended up having a great day. In fact, they BOTH ended up having a fantastic day. Last night Ethan told me, "I LOVE FIRST GRADE!" He said that it was more fun than he thought it would be. :)

I had emailed Emily's teacher during the day to check on her and to make sure that she was okay. The reply I got was a good one. She called Emily an "angel" and said that Emily is helping her out with a special needs child in the room. Emily also told me that she was asked if she wanted to read this poem in front of the class. I was VERY surprised that Emily did it, especially on the first day of school. I was very proud of her.

Ethan came home acting so grown up and was telling me about his day. When I asked him if he made any new friends, he said, "It's just the first day. We are just getting to know the people right now." Funny child! How silly of me to think that he would have made a friend on the first day. :) The interesting thing for me was to see the papers in his folder. Remember his paper aversion this summer??? Well, he has SUDDENLY gotten over it and had no problems with paper yesterday. In fact, there was one page that he colored that was amazing. Almost the entire paper was colored. And there were some papers that he did where he had to fill in the blanks about the first day of school. It was very cute and said things like his name, the date, where he goes to school, his teacher's name, who he sits next to, and one of their class rules. I was commenting on what a good job he did on his paper and he said, "I cheated on it." I asked him what he was talking about and he said, "I cheated. She let us cheat. She had the information written on the board and we just had to copy it down." That made me laugh. I thought it was funny that Ethan referred to that as "cheating" because he didn't have to come up with the answers on his own and he didn't have to spell the words on his own. He did announce to me what a great speller he is because he had to sound out one word yesterday. :) One thing that he is very excited about in his class is the conduct system. They earn "sticks" for doing good things and then get the sticks taken away if they do something wrong. After they earn 10 sticks then they get a golden stick and get to earn a special prize. Ethan loves this program and was telling me about how he is going to earn 10,000 sticks. Ha-ha! Let's just hope that he keeps up this great attitude.

Overall, it was a great first day of school. And they woke up very excited for today to begin. Emily made it very clear this morning that she does not want us to walk her in today. I told her that it is a good thing because we aren't allowed to walk her in anyway. :) I can't wait to hear about how their day is today.