Curriculum Night

Last night was the much awaited curriculum night for Zane's grade - I was more excited than I think a normal human being should be!  I was very excited to meet his teacher, see his classroom, see his table where he sits and just see the classroom from his point of view!  His teacher is great and I think will be a great fit for him, she has been teaching 17 years and 14 of them have been in Kindergarten - she loves this age and loves to help them learn!  I love that!  Mrs. Boysen is very regimented and very organized and all about routine and thankfully that is something that Zane thrives on!  I've always been pretty routined with my boys, sometimes to a fault - but I really think its been good for them.

One of the big focuses of the year is of course to help all of the kids learn how to read.  This is VERY important to me.  Someone once told me that in grades K-3 kids "learn to read" and in grades 4 and above kids "read to learn" if they don't succeed in learning to read in the first 4 years, they will have a hard time succeeding in learning anything the following years and I'm a big believer in that.  Zane does not take a huge interest in learning to read and I won't lie, it does bother me at times, but I'm trying to just let school take its course. He'd rather work on math problems all day long (who is this kid??)!  Mrs. Boysen assured me that everyone will have at least the basics of reading down by the end of the year.  She said there are 7-8 kids in the class who are already strong readers and there are 5-6 kids who don't even know most of their letters yet.  I was amazed at that.  Thankfully Zane does not fall into that group of 5-6 kids...he knows all of his letters, can write them and knows all of their sounds (its putting the sounds together to sound out a word that is still a bit tricky for him).  I was amazed at the wide range of kids in the class and it made me appreciate the roll of a teacher even more - she has her work cut out for her!

I'm very excited for this year and can't wait to see what it has in store for Zane!

Here are a few pictures I took (you didn't think I would go and not take any pictures did you?!)...

Love his little name tag!

Where circle time is held - just thought the carpet was cute!

Man, times have changed...we didn't have cool ActivBoards like this when I was a kid!
It was good old chalk and a chalkboard!

His teacher loves owls and its apparent in her room!  Each of the kids made their own owl - cute!