End of the School Year Recap

To wrap up the school year, both of our girls had little ceremonies to celebrate their accomplishments from throughout the school year.  First, Taelyn had a small promotion up to 1st grade in her classroom.  She received a certificate and then led an animal charades activity for us while other students organized different activities for their own parents.

Taelyn and Elliot lead Animal Charades

Taelyn is a lion!

Kaelia is Caring!

PE Award

The next day, Kaelia had a ceremony in the gym where she received two awards.  The first was the Caring Award for demonstrating caring behaviors all throughout the school year.  Then she earned a PE class award for having good sportsmanship this year while also doing well with her motor development.  To sum up both attributes, I like to think about a little incident that happened once in PE that her teachers told up about.  Kaelia took a really big swing of a bat and accidentally hit another student in the head.  The other student started crying, and Kaelia was so upset by what she did that she started crying too.  Eventually the PE teacher had to console and comfort Kaelia more than the other child!  I guess that shows that she can both swing a bat and is caring.

Other than the end of year awards, here is a recap on the girls' experience at school.

Kaelia - Pre-K:
Kaelia made her debut to big-kid school in Pre-K this year where she spent five full days of school per week.  This was a lot for her to take in during the first semester and was often very tired.  She grew quite a bit during the second semester, however, and had a completely different take on school from then on.

Kaelia has made drastic improvements in her reading, writing, and math this year.  She learned how to use both capital and lower case letters correctly and can count to 40 with no mistakes (sometimes more than 40, but is not consistent).  Kaelia can also do some simple adding like 1+1.  Her biggest area of growth, however, is her reading.  She learned sight words in class and then applied that knowledge when Taelyn brought home her own reading homework.  Kaelia is now on a PM level 6 which is the average level of the beginning of 1st grade.  More importantly, however, is that Kaelia loves to read to us!  We are so proud of her.

Socially, Kaelia had a wonderful experience with her classmates.  She enjoyed playing with everyone as well as independently.  She was especially close with the four other girls in her class in addition to her several boy interests!

The highlight of Kaelia's year by far when during her last unit on journeys.  Her class learned all about the USA and set up the classroom to become America while the other Pre-K classes did the same with Egypt and France.  Then they packed their suitcases, grabbed their passports, and went on a journey to the other Pre-K classes where they "visited" the other countries.  When visitors came to Kaelia's class, she got to be a bank teller and give them US money.  Kaelia developed a huge sense of pride for her home country in this event - especially when she learned about the first people to walk on the moon.  Because of this knowledge, she now has aspirations to become an astronaut for the US someday!

Taelyn - Kindergarten:
Taelyn started the year off on a very good note, making new friends and getting to know her teachers.  She especially liked her music and art classes, but did well in all of her subjects.  Shortly in to the school year, however, her kindergarten teacher had some family problems and was absent several days a week for 2.5 months.  Then her teacher decided to go back to her home country, and Taelyn's class took on a new teacher.  This lack of routine and consistently was very difficult for Taelyn, and the rest of the school year was spent on trying to get her back on track with classroom routines and her academics.  By the end of the school year, though, Taelyn made big gains.

Academically, Taelyn really excelled in her reading after Spring Break.  She loves reading signs outside as we are driving, and she recently discovered that she can read independently in bed after we have already said good night.  Taelyn also has been working on her writing quite a bit.  She is focusing on making writing smaller and neater in addition to trying to sound out how a word should be spelled.  This will still take some time and practice as she continues to get exposure to word spellings and connects how the English language is different from Arabic - another class that she took this year as a school requirement.  Finally, Taelyn has grown in her math skills; she can count past 100 and can add any numbers from 0-10.

Socially, Taelyn was fortunate to have a really good group of friends this year.  She stuck mostly with the girls, and there were plenty of them for her to choose from.  At times, the girls had to figure out how to get along with some many people wanting to decide what to play, and this led to some great problem-solving practice.

The highlight of Taelyn's year was when her class took a field trip to a nearby horse stable.  Here, she learned all about K-2, one of the horses, including what horses eat and how to care for them.  Taelyn now still points out the stables from across the city to tell us that where Al Shiquab Stables are.

Personalize your own photo slideshow