This past Wednesday, Cameron’s class had an absolutely adorable graduation ceremony at the school. The day came upon us in a hurry–there were so many end-of-year field trips, celebrations, and performances sprinkled in with the every day work deadlines, the backlog of household chores, and the weekly school-volunteering!
It has been exhausting (and continues to be), but it has also been joyful and exciting. Cameron has clearly grown up a lot this past year. Not only is she stretching out and getting leaner, but she is also getting better at managing her emotions and is more compassionate and able to compromise.
Academically, she met every single metric at 100% (save for second-language development). She is reading 2 levels below the benchmark for the end of first grade and her math skills are excellent; she is already pretty good at doubling numbers, counting by 2’s, 5’s and 10’s, and doing simple single-digit addition. Beyond that, she’s speaking Spanish. I mean, really speaking Spanish. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to hear her ask questions about class work in Spanish instead of English–I can’t even fully understand what she says.
She has much to work on over the summer — we are required to read, write and speak in Spanish with her and to her every day during the summer — but there is no doubt that she has gotten a very good start to developing her bilingualism! It is very exciting and impressive!
It has been a joy to see her hard work paying off (and she has amazing teachers to boot)! She had a fantastic time at the ceremony. After singing a couple of very cute songs (one saying goodbye to Kindergarten and another about 3 hugs a day) and getting their promotion certificates, all of the kids ran around and played. It was so great to see her connecting with her peers! A few more pictures below:
Teacher Shanna is the other Dos Alas Kindergarten teacher and, the way the program works is that the primary teacher speaks to the class only in Spanish and, once a week (I think), the teachers swap classrooms and do a lesson in English. It works out to about 90% Spanish – 10% English (incidentally, all of Cameron’s homework was in Spanish). So Teacher Shanna was Cameron’s English teacher–another amazing teacher/person. We are really hitting the teacher jackpot at this school!
heading back to the line
Originally uploaded by coffywoman.
We are looking forward to all that first grade will bring! It will be a whole new adventure!
