First grade

First grade seems to be going well for Jordan.  On the first day of school (which was three weeks ago now), he ran with glee to meet his buddies that he had not seen all summer, and they immediately started aping around.

It happened to be a rainy day, so the lining up took place inside.  Here is his new teacher, Miss Wodrich (pronounced Woodrich), at the head of the line.  That's Jordan in the orange coat with the blue backpack.

Miss Wodrich is as new as next week.  Not only is she a brand-new hire, she's a new teacher; she only graduated from college a year ago, and spent the last year as a substitute in the Seattle schools.  I'm electing to believe that we're getting the advantage of all her freshness and enthusiasm and best practices.  There were 90 applicants for her position, so she must have distinguished herself to get the job.  Interestingly she is a graduate of SPU - my colleagues were among her teachers.  

Here is Jordan moving his name from the "absent" to the "present" column, which each kid does every day upon entering the classroom.

And here's the classroom.  You can see Jordan near the middle in a white shirt.  His class meets in one of the "portables," which is small and doesn't have running water.  But then his class only has 18 kids.  That's a gigantic difference from the 27 in a typical class, and a big reason we wanted to get him into the Spectrum program.

First grade is overwhelmingly about reading, writing, and math.  Science and social studies share a one-hour slot at the end of the day... a big step down from Jordan's kindergarten, which had a carnivorous plant bog and a cactus garden and a teacher with a grant to do oceanography with the kids.  On the bright side, Jordan loves math, and his reading and writing skills are ramping up quickly.  Here's his photo and drawings introducing himself - there's one for each kid, and they take up most of one wall:

It says, "I LiCE PlAAinG on tHE PlAGrAOwnD."  In case you are not up-to-date on literacy research, "invented" or "best-guess" spelling is encouraged for first-graders as an appropriate developmental phase.  Kids who are taught to stop and spell everything properly don't get to write as much, and probably get anxious about it.  Just "doing your best" and not worrying about it is not only more enjoyable for the kids, it's also more fun for me: I can almost always read what he writes, which is just so great, and  I get an interesting window on his understanding of phonetics.

Here is another example, from his math homework this morning.  The instructions (which he read!) were to do a "thermometer hunt" (find a variety of thermometers in your house), then draw and label them.  We found a lot of thermometers:  the one with which we take his temperature, the one on the thermostat, the one on the back fence, the one in the fish tank, my meat thermometer, and another one that records the temperature at two different indoor locations (with a remote sensor).  I went and took a shower while he drew and labeled them.  I had no idea what he would do for labels, but he did not even pause:  sic, insid, wethr, fish, cishin, and haoos.  How cool is that, that he can express himself in writing actually rather clearly with no support at all?  

On the way to school, I said I thought it was very impressive how his spelling shows all the sounds, and we talked about all the great things you can do with writing.  Label stuff!  Make a sign!  Write a note!  Address a letter!  Write a story!  Fantastic.