End of the School Year

May is always a whirlwind with all of the end of the school year activities!

 

Elliot really enjoyed his first year in the gifted program. Once a week they bus a few kids from each school in the district to Sopori Elementary School, which is about 40 minutes away. There are about 15 kids for each grade across the district. Elliot likes it - his report was that they can go to the bathroom whenever they want without having to ask, have cool chairs and fidget toys, and nine different kinds of rubik's cubes. The teacher there is definitely able to get more effort out of him - I can tell from his handwriting and the stuff he brings home. She also occasionally sends home pictures of their projects, like this one of Elliot building robots that they got to program in Scratch. It's a good fit for him and keeps him from getting bored in his homeroom class. 

Elliot is definitely still in his "keep track pro" phase. He made these cards with a dry erase section to keep track of peaches picked today, total peaches picked, and the record one day pick.

 It was a record setting year for the peach tree! We should have thinned the peaches on it far more than I did. I felt like I took a ton off, but we were still left with 1,868 peaches picked with the daily max of 216. That doesn't count the peaches that fell off or were eaten by birds. We had a few branches break under the weight of all the fruit. It was a peach palooza to remember! The new peachy event for this year was making dried peach slices in the dehydrator. They were yummy, but a few mason jar's worth went bad because I didn't dry them enough. The lesson learned there was to slice it in wedges with a consistent amount of skin on each piece. 

Peach chicken yumminess!

We had the parent homework assignment of making encouraging posters for Elliot during test week. I thought it was a bit unnecessary, but Aaron and I took the opportunity to try to make him laugh with some targeted pop culture references.

Annie absolutely loved Kindergarten. She made some great friends, particularly Abigail, and loved her teacher, Mrs. Arauz.

Here's her kindergarten music performance. They sang hit songs like "I know my alphabet backwards and forwards" and "LMNO." Annie took the performance very seriously. Our house was filled with the sounds of Annie belting out her alphabet songs for a few weeks. 

Every morning she got to watch a few minutes of something on the iPad while I did her hair. I was pretty proud of my wacky hair day efforts.

Pretty wacky indeed!

Annie had surgery to get her tonsils out during the second to last week of school. She was very brave about it and excited to eat all kinds of ice cream and puddings during the recovery. It ended up being SO MUCH WORSE than I thought it would be. All food tasted awful - even popsicles! If she took her pain meds without food then she would throw up. If she went too long without the pain meds, she melted into a flailing ball of misery incapable of clear thinking. There were some miserable nights where I had to wake her up at night and convince her to eat even a bite or two of bread so that she could take her medicine. It lasted a whole week, and she had to miss out on some of the fun last week of school activities.

She did make it to her class party, but I took her home for a nap after instead of having her stay the whole day.

Mrs Arauz taught spelling with songs. It worked so well with Annie. 

She loved this class!

Annie drew this picture. I thought it was Breezy in her motorized wheelchair, but she said "No, those are just some queens and cats." I love that my kids now think that wheelchairs are completely normal.

Our little kinder graduate!