I’m fairly amused by L’s writing.  Because she’s going to French school, she writes her numbers the French way, and they write English exclusively in cursive.

Sample 1:

I’m too lazy to search for a writing sample at the moment . Maybe later.

So far, I’m actually extremely pleased with L’s school.  H and I thought the academics were probably sub-par, a conclusion we drew form the 90s era “computer lab” and the fact that they obviously have a much smaller pool of teachers to draw from.  But I think the coursework is actually fairly rigorous for first grade.  Memorizing 10 lines of French poetry every couple weeks is on the face of it rather pointless, but I think it’s teaching L a type of rigor that will serve her well.  Weekly spelling tests in French and even French worksheets are always challenging, just due to the language barrier.   L’s French has taken off, thankfully.  (At one point late last school year, I was wondering if she would ever learn.)

On the social side, I am worried.  I see in L all the things that I myself struggled with in elementary school – paralyzing shyness and general social awkwardness that my sister never struggled with, and similarly, L’s little sister has no issues with.  In addition, L has a level of cautiousness that I never had, and the combination I fear will make life difficult for her as she grows older.  Her teacher says she is usually on her own at recess, apparently by choice, because she considers the games too rough.  (L says the same thing.)  Her teacher is absolutely wonderful and working to help her include herself in the games, but just as lack of ability in math or reading given a different rate of learning will become more pronounced, I fear the same will happen with social skills.

For myself, I feel that I’ve managed to attain enough social skills to function relatively well in society and at work.  My theory is that most people plateau at some point, maybe 16 or 18 or 21, and for those of us who were behind, if we continue to work at it, we can catch up.  I do feel I caught up a bit.  In school, I do think i struggled doubly because I was much younger than everyone else, thanks to starting school in PA with a 12/31 deadline and a 12/23 birthday and then moving.  L is nearly a full year older than I was in first grade, and I’m hopeful that that will help her navigate a little better socially.

L’s been back at school now for about a month.  Homework started in week 2, and it’s more or less ramped up since then.  Occasionally she has a worksheet to do, and those are no big deal.  What’s much, much harder are things that require studying.  First of all, she has two spelling tests each week, one in French and one in English.  Trying to get her to study has been like pulling teeth.

Then, she had to memorize a French poem that was about 16 lines long.  Now, Jonathan and I both studied French in school, but that was a long time ago, and many parents are in the same boat, so the teacher sent home a recording of the poem being read.  But that just makes it that much harder to learn, as we have to try and play the recording over and over again, at least until we can pronounce it properly.  (To our ears anyway – L is not impressed by our French.)  Learning a 16 line poem or song in English wouldn’t necessarily be a walk in the park, even.  So that was a challenge and nearly brought us to blows.  After a couple weeks to learn the first poem, we all heaved a sign of relief . . . and then L brought home another French poem to learn today.

We’re also struggling to figure out what she’s supposed to have done when.  I expected she’d just bring home a worksheet or something due the next day, but we’re getting a bunch of these studying tasks with a few days lead time that require our participation.

Friends with kids . . . is this similar to your experience?  I don’t see why homework is necessary in first grade anyway.

On the plus side, L told me she made a new friend today, with a new girl who only speaks French.  (It’s funny how L classifies kids in her class.  Last year she insisted – accurately no doubt – that she didn’t speak French.  All the other kids in her class were classified as English speakers, French speakers or both – no wiggle room.  You either speak a language or you don’t.)  Anyway, even after a year, L hadn’t owned up to actually speaking any French except on rare occasion.  But now’s she’s starting to admit she does speak a bit, and she apparently had a conversation with her new friend in French, which is kind of cool.

I’m so proud of L.  She was promoted to Level IV of the Y swimming classes today.  Basically, she’s learned how to do the crawl and side-breathe.   She can still only swim about 10 yards before she needs a break.  On a macro level, it’s not a big deal.  My brother was already swimming competitively at age 6, as do many, many kids back where I grew up.  Still, it’s been an uphill battle here.  First of all, global warming aside, we still don’t have THAT much truly hot weather here in Seattle.  It’s in the 80s to low 90s the last few days, but as of Wednesday it’ll be back in the 70s.  There are very few neighborhood pools here.  Most pools have limited “free swim” time, just lessons and classes most of the day.

Then, I started L in swim lessons at 3.  The teacher promptly dunked her.  Hysterics ensued, and we ended up dropping out.  (It didn’t help that Bri was an infant in arms at that point.)  We sporadically did swim through the years, and she finally made it out of Level I (water acclimation) into Level II (Water Movement.)  Water Movement is more or less where they learn to swim.  To get out of Level II, you need to be able to kind of swim, not gracefully, but definitely swim.  And she was stuck in Water Movement forever.  We kept not signing up for lessons for one reason or another – classes were full or it wasn’t convenient or whatever.  Finally, this summer, I decided these children were going to learn to swim.  The Y does lessons Monday through Thursday in summer to two week sessions, and so both girls started going to the lessons four days a week.  Our awesome nanny found a pool that actually had free swim in the afternoons and started taking them swimming a few times a week in addition to lessons.  And finally, not surprisingly, they started making progress.

Some things are easy for L.  Reading, studying, art, dance, things that aren’t physical or scary.  Those things are easy.  But things like swimming, riding a bike, and probably lots of things to come, are not easy at all.  And the satisfaction when she learned to ride her bike and now learned to swim is just huge.  It feels so good for both of us.

We’ve been trying to think of ways to teach L about money, and we tried something randomly which seems to be working well.  We’ve been giving her an allowance for a while, one dollar per week.  She’s figured out that that doesn’t buy much, but not much else.  I’d been promising to open a bank account for her for a while, but I’ve been somewhat disheartened by the 0 interest rates from the major banks.  BECU provides 5% interest annually, or something like that, on the first several hundred dollars you deposit in a basic savings account, so I considered that route.  However, we eventually decided that we would instead open our own bank, the Bank of Daddy as we’ve been calling it.  We found an old bank book and gave her $50 as a bonus for depositing her existing life savings, approximately $30.  Every week, she has the option of taking her allowance in cash or depositing it in the Bank of Daddy.  Further, the Bank of Daddy is very generous and pays 10% interest per month.  Yup, that’s 300% interest annually, assuming full compounding.  Fortunately, given the initial balance of only $80, the Bank of Daddy can afford to be generous.

(I did mention that like all banks, the Bank of Daddy reserves the right to change its interest and terms at any time.)

The cool thing is that even given L’s very limited grasp of math, she has figured out that this interest thing is awesome.  She has been eagerly depositing her allowance in the B of D, and she’s counting the days until her first interest payment.  She really enjoys writing her allowance deposits in her bank book with our help.  She’s totally gotten the concept of money written on paper being the same as real money.

Anyway, I’m kind of excited by how well this is going.  We’ll have to see how it sticks.