On her game

The intake interview with Emily's JK teacher, Mrs. B, went great. Emily was just about jumping out of her shoes to get into that classroom. When Mrs. B came to get us from the waiting area, Emily starting jumping. Mrs. B remarked that clearly someone was excited about starting school. It was a good first impression.

I found it really cool how Mrs. B asked Emily to do things that seemed to Emily to be mostly normal things but really were a way for Mrs. B to assess how far along Emily is with reading, colours, shapes etc. The first thing she asked Emily to do was to find her name tag in the cloak room area. Then she got to pick a cubby hole and Mrs. B taped the name tag to the cubby. Then Emily had to picked a coloured laminated card (and tell Mrs. B the colour she chose) and a sticker to put on the card. The card then went in her cubby. It will be her sticker card for all the stickers she'll get over the next while. Thank you thank you thank you. I'm so tired of peeling stickers off the wood floor in our house.

After a quick explanation of the cubby hole and what she's expected to do when she arrives (changing shoes, hanging up backpack, sitting in bottom of cubby to show she's ready), we went into the class for the big tour.

First we sat on the coloured square on the carpet, something they'll always do when they first arrive. Emily had to tell her the colours of the lines making up the square and then identify the shapes inside the big square. She nailed it. Emily has known all this stuff for a long time, easily identifying colours by the time she was two but if she is in a new situation with a stranger she has the tendency to freeze up and claim she doesn't know things just to get out of having to talk. Not yesterday. She was totally on her game and pretty comfortable from the start. I think she was fuelled by excitement.

After that it was a tour of all the stations and then Mrs. B and I sat down and talked while Emily drew a picture and played in the playhouse (her favourite thing there, she tells me).

I think Emily will do really well there. I think she'll love it. I think, from what I learned in a short interview, that Mrs. B is a great teacher for Emily. I think we might have some issues with getting Emily on the bus. It's the only thing she says she's nervous about. I've told her she doesn't have to take it the first day if she doesn't want to.

Tomorrow she goes for her first real class.

How did we get here so fast?