Full Day Kindergarten

Jack is now a full day student!  I didn't want to pay tuition all year (especially during the holiday and sickness season).  I wanted to start him in January, but musical rehearsals complicated things.  Well, rehearsals are over for me.  So for the last three months of Kindergarten I enrolled Jack in full day.  His class was blended half and full day.  All that changed is he no longer leaves at 10:50 in the morning.  Instead he goes to lunch in the cafeteria (scary!) then a second recess (woo!) followed by alternating classes in art, PE, computer lab, science, and social studies.  Basically all the FUN stuff in school.  At the end they have free time, what you might typically think of as Kindergarten play time, but has been relegated to preschool and day care in today's education world.

Wednesday was his first official day, but it happened to be an early release day.  His teacher shares pictures on the ClassDojo app and included one of lunch - I like to think she did it for me :-)

Oh, I should mention that on that first afternoon, Sam was excitedly running around the asphalt play area and biffed it hard.  He fell onto this front and flipped feet over head.  He got an impressive bump!  Poor kid.  He seemed to forget about it by the next day though.  Kids are tough.

Thursday was a real full day, going all the way until 2:55.  He came out happy and proud!

His main complaint is that lunch is too short (20 minutes) and he doesn't get to watch TV.  Ben and I laughed at him.  We've known that it would be a tough day when he had to stop his Roman siesta style lunches with 1+ hours of TV and second (and third) helpings of food.  I make it up to him with an after school snack and no more quiet time.

Sam and I had a spectacular day together.  I felt less rushed without squeezing errands into school time.  We had more play time together and he helped me make S'mores tarts.  I put him down right after lunch for a nap and, as I suspected, he took to the early time very well.  When I had to wake him to pick up Jack he was in a better mood than usual.  I'll find out soon if the lack of post-nap grouchiness is because of the new time or was a fluke.  The weather was nice so we bundled up to walk to the school.  I think he liked the extra time to snooze.