Ethan is excelling in 1st grade with Mrs. Amato. Mrs. Amato is also a fantastic teacher. I am so blessed with these teachers!!! She has 3 boys herself, just about the ages of our 3. I love her approach to teaching the whole child. She’s warm and friendly and has 20 years experience teaching this grade level. Her philosophies are very similar to mine. She emphasizes family time at home over busy-work homework. She let me know this past week that she is assessing the children’s reading level and Ethan has now shown that he has surpassed the reading level for the end of 1st grade and is beginning to test out of early 2nd grade reading.

Because of the way she runs her 1st/2nd grade split class, he is also learning division! Every day they come up with equations to reach the number of the day, which increases by 1 each day. Ethan likes to do equations with multiple functions and numbers (like (100 / 2) – 40 + 3 = 13) and she has told him he is doing ALGEBRA. But one of his 1sr grade classmates is a math whiz and, being exposed to his more advanced multiplication and division solutions, the children have begun to understand the patterns of this 3rd and 4th grade math.

Ethan is in class with other “independent workers,” kids who can progress without a lot of hand-holding. Half of the 10 1st graders were in Ethan’s highly competitive kindergarten. It wasn’t the parents and teacher who made the class competitive… it was the students! They had a race to see who would read the most books! They challenged each other to see who could figure out harder math problems! (Jason wrote a note to Sophia K: Do you know what 7 * 14 is? DO YOU?) I love that they were inspiring each other to do their best. It also seemed to be a healthy, supportive competition to me, although I didn’t have much of a vantage.

One thing we’ve been working on with Ethan is his upper body strength, which we hope will improve his fine motor skills as well. We decided that every day we would get to school early enough that he could cross the monkey bars at the playground. At first it was tough for him. A month later he can go across and back again.

He gets up an hour and a half before school so he has time to wake up, get hungry enough to eat a good breakfast with protein, and walk to school with his dad and brothers.

The transition to all-day school has been tough on Ethan. 4 days a week extend until 2:40, Wednesdays are a minimum day letting out at 12:20. He says he misses me and he doesn’t get to spend enough time with me. But he’s slowly getting into the swing of things schedule-wise.