Meet the Teachers

Normally, one of four local libraries has Lego Mania on Wednesday afternoons, but today was the fifth Wednesday so the our library had a puppet show. Now, there are two kinds of puppet shows at the library: 1)The ones based on books (ex: Rainbow Fish) and 2)The original pro-library puppet shows the staff makes up. This one was the latter, it was called The Princess and the Pirate. Three guesses what the "treasure" was. It was cute, but it could've used a bit more action. The puppets looked great though. My kids certainly enjoyed themselves.

I did very much enjoy the pop-up book they read before the show. It was The Castaway Pirates. Mike is especially a fan of a well illustrated pop-up book and I appreciated that this one has lots of action. It's on my list of things to get Miss Roo for Christmas. Speaking of books, Isaac has finally grown into some of the books we gave him two summers ago. He just finished Uncle Albert and the Quantum Quest and really enjoyed it.

As it turns out he was the only student in his grade to complete his summer reading list. They even featured this tidbit on the morning announcements last week. Exciting stuff. For those of you who don't remember he only completed 4 battle books all school year last year so this was a dramatic improvement. This evening we went to open house to meet Isaac's teachers.

Mrs P. is his homeroom teacher, she does language arts. He has Mrs. S. for math and science. I liked them they had clearly both been teaching a long time. They were very grounded and seemed pretty unflappable. This was a huge relief to me since some newer younger teachers have been overwhelmed by Isaac in the past for various reasons. I could tell things would be handled in a swift and effective manner in their classrooms. That being said neither seems excessively stern of cold in the least.

Mrs. P's got Isaac's number and it's only week two. She said "He's VERY curious about many, many things. He's a sweet boy, but he gets his heart set on something and if it doesn't happen ..(she make a hand gesture and sound effect to represent a rapid deflation)". Um, yup. Captain Entitled, that's him. If you point out how his bratty behavior is negatively impacting others he usually reigns it in though. Isaac tested his teacher that very afternoon. Do your kids always act up before open house and conferences too? Every time. Anyway, she handled it the way I would have. No warnings or coddling just an appropriate set of consequences and move on.

I hope he has as much fun in fourth grade as I remember having. It's good to be one of the "big kids". Fingers crossed all our work this summer paid off.