Introducing........

My kindergartner. The day finally arrived. The one that she was anxiously been awaiting and the one that I have been silently fearing. The first day of kindergarten. I believe in this school enough to be willing to camp out in line for nine days to get her into it, so why suddenly did I start thinking about home schooling? I have gone through many different phases this summer, from fear, dread and panic, to excitement for me (and me after this past week). Today, she was so excited when she woke up, but by the time we dropped Sarah off at a friend's house, it became eerily quiet in the car. As I walked her into the school, I had to choke back tears. I think the look on my face made it obvious that we were newbies, as teachers quickly directed us to the kindergarten waiting area.

Thankfully, the school does what they call "phase in" days. For the first week of kindergarten, they only bring in a fraction of the class each day, and each child only comes for one day each of the first two weeks. Rachel met with her teacher and five other classmates today and parents were asked to stay with them. Thank goodness I wasn't expected to just walk away and lose it all in the parking lot! Parents spent the morning in the kid's class and ate lunch with them, then spent over two hours in a meeting going over all sorts of school information. Rachel is attending a Paideia school, so there is a lot of philosophy that parents have to understand, we met all the other teachers and specialists and got a general idea of how things work.

After letting the teachers have the kids to themselves for an hour, the parents rejoined the class as the kids presented their summer reading projects. Each child was asked to read at least ten books and then choose one to do some sort of project on. The project was left open to us. Rachel and I read The Quilt Story and I took the opportunity to teach Rachel some sewing basics. The quilt in her lap is the end result. Actually, I should say, the quilt top in her lap is the end result. I didn't allow for the attention span of a five year old when we set about making this, so the actual quilt will be finished later. Regardless, she completed nine log cabin blocks on her own. All I did was iron seams, square up the blocks and add the red sashing. The actual blocks are all her work and I love how it turned out. Dare I say she had the best project in the class?

I'll have to post a better picture of the quilt once we get it back. We had to leave it at school for now, which I was a bit leery of. Fingers crossed that it returns to us in the same state that we left it in! I would have already posted pictures, if it weren't for the fact that it was being finished last night around 9 PM.

And the trip and birthday party. All went well, but those are stories for another day.