One Day Left

Tomorrow is the last day of school! Laurel grew and changed a lot this year. When I think of "first graders" in a general sense, they seem very young to me. Ramona Quimby comes to mind. But when I look at Laurel, she seems so grown up. Last year we started a tradition of cake for breakfast on the last day of school. It was sort of accidental, but the kids loved it so much they have been talking about it for the last month. Marlene, our neighbor who walks Laurel to school every day, will join us.

Laurel lost all of her teeth and new ones grew in to fill the gaps. She outgrew her school uniforms and got a lot better on her bike and shifted from reading out loud to reading chapter books, silently and obsessively. We have to check on her at night and make her go to sleep because she sneaks them under her covers with a flashlight. She has a lot of artistic talent, especially with conveying emotion with the figures she draws. Her Girl Scout troop moved from Daisies to Brownies, and she's going to 2 short camp sessions this summer, where hopefully she'll have good experiences with horses. She's been begging for horse riding lessons for years.

Laurel attends a fabulous school and her teachers do a great job of treating the kids as kids, while still challenging them with lots of creative and in-depth projects. During each unit of the year they produced something very tangible. For instance, they wrote a book about the school for incoming kindergarten students. They also built a miniature city, complete with transportation and water systems! They visited an apiary and the PWSA reservoir. They have lots of outdoor time and art time. I don't feel like I have to jam in a lot of "fun" learning activities for her during the summer. If anything, she just wants free time.

This summer, we're keeping it pretty simple and close to home. Library, spray park, hike, repeat. I babysit a few other kids, so we have some built in playmates. We have a microscope and some test kits to examine the water in our neighborhood. We will watch The Kid Should See This and then probably do some of the things we watch. We're all going to learn to play the piano and I set up some accounts for them to play chess online with each other and with bots.

The last day of school feels totally different as a stay-at-home mom compared to when I was a teacher! I'm not dreading it, but it definitely has more of a "game on!" feel than the "phew, we made it."