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Another milestone accomplished!
As Miss Kielbasa opened the door for her little charges to leave Spring City Elementary School on the last day of school, she announced, “Here are the first-graders.”
I can hardly believe that my little guy is finished with kindergarten. Believe me, time really does fly. If you’re a new parent, you may think the days of diapers and bottles will never end, but before you know it, your baby is grown. So enjoy the time while you can.
It doesn’t seem possible that almost six years have passed since that memorable July morning when Benjamin was born. But it has, and now there’s a kindergarten graduate in our house.
We had a great kindergarten year, even if it flew by way too fast. It looked like we were going to be off to a rocky start last August, when Benjamin broke his arm just a few days before school began. But we came through that (and the second broken arm in November) without too much trouble.
With Benjamin being our only child, I had no idea what to expect of kindergarten, academically or socially. Would he make friends? Would he follow the rules of the classroom? What would he learn?
I am happy to say that the answers to all those questions were very satisfactory. Benjamin quickly made friends with all the children in his class. Miss Kielbasa assured us that he would happily play with any of the other children, although naturally he spent more time with some than others.
I guess it’s really not surprising that Benjamin built friendships with all his classmates. After all, his kindergarten class was smaller than his preschool class had been. At the start of the year, the class included 12 students, but two moved away before Christmas, leaving 10 for much of the year. Another moved away in the spring, so that the class ended up with nine children.
Yes, you read that correctly. In the public school, Benjamin’s kindergarten class was only nine children! I love Spring City Elementary School. It’s quite a jewel in the Spring-Ford School District. And even if the class size grows, it’s still an intimate setting, with only two classrooms per grade level.
(By the way, if small class sizes in a small school appeal to you, Spring City is the Spring-Ford School District’s open enrollment school. That means anyone, residing anywhere in the school district, can enroll their child in Spring City. If you’re interested, contact the school district registrar, Mary Chrisman, 610-705-6203, as soon as possible, before the summer flies by.)
I’m not sure if it was the small class size, the skill of his fantastic teacher or what, but Benjamin also did a great job of following the rules this year. (That may surprise some of his former Sunday school and Pioneer Club teachers, who often let me know that Benjamin did not sit and listen very well.)
The children had a color-coded card system. Green meant they obeyed the rules. If they misbehaved, their card went to yellow. Further disobedience resulted in an orange and ultimately to a red. If children “stayed green” all week, they were able to choose a small reward on Friday. Benjamin was quite proud of the fact that he only went yellow once through the entire school year. I was pleased, too.
Then there are the academics. Again, this may be in large part due to the small class size, but Benjamin passed kindergarten with flying colors. His final report card has excellent marks, and I’m really impressed with all the children learned this year.
Like I said, Benjamin’s our only child, so I didn’t know what would be taught in kindergarten. I didn’t realize he would be doing simple addition and even a little subtraction by the end of the year. (I even caught him doing addition completely in his head the other day – no counting on fingers or anything!)
And reading! For the past month or so, Benjamin has been reading a complete, 32-page, beginning reader book at one sitting, almost every day. Hand-in-hand with the reading is the writing. I love to see him concentrate on writing sentences, and sometimes he writes something just for fun, with no prompting at all.
I was looking for some workbooks and such to reinforce his learning over the summer, and the ones that were labeled as “K-1” seemed much too easy. He’s way beyond that. So I picked up some “1-2” workbooks, and I’m looking forward to our summer “homeschool,” as Benjamin calls it.
And I say a great big “thank you” to Amanda Kielbasa and Spring City Elementary School. Kindergarten was certainly a huge success.
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