This is the New Year

All this week I am attending Parent Information Afternoons at the kids' school.  This basically means we go in to school 45 minutes early, listen to a spiel from the Management Team, have a question and answer with the class teacher about the coming year, then get a chance to interact with our kids in their classroom.

One teacher appeared very scattered, as seems to be the nature of lower school teachers and classrooms, one I was glad used a powerpoint slide, though his presentation left much to be desired, and the third blew me away with her coolness (guess which one has just come from a private school out in the Middle East?!?).  The fourth one (and actually the one which I was most interested in as Lightning's year this year is doing 'group learning') the Don ended up attending, as I was elbow deep in wallpaper paste.

Anyway, last year the spiel from the Management Team was long, and by the time I attended my fourth afternoon I could have recited it off by heart.  This year they barely said five words, which I'm not complaining about, and instead we heard more from the class teachers and had more time with our kids.  Joey's work, this year, was wonderful to see.

I love that he found a football at the top of his beanstalk!
And his brother, he told me...

More so because last year his teacher left on sick leave, and then his replacement teacher left on sick leave, and then the original teacher came back part-time, so we ended up missing a couple of parent-teacher meetings and generally felt like we didn't know very much.  And though of course he reads and writes as home, his writing especially is not particularly forthcoming, so to see his writing in sentences and paragraphs and related drawings is very, very pleasing!