Today was the first day meeting the new teacher who is to replace Ms. Helen. Ms. Helen's English class within our housing complex was quite popular, and actually had a waiting list. For the pre-schoolers, the one hour classes (twice a week) were really more play with stories, games, songs, and arts and crafts around a theme. Some of the fun activities that come to mind was the class on dinosaurs where the kids had to go on an archeological dig and find the dinosaurs buried in the playgrounds (hidden before class), make fossil imprints using clay... the list goes on. Initially, I enrolled Tyler mainly for group socialization and just plain old fun, but was pleasantly surprised afterwards at all the new words/concepts he was exposed to, e.g, the little dipper, the word "locomotive" came up at some point... Although I've tried to explain that Ms. Helen had to move back to the U.S. starting this summer, Tyler still asks about her class from time to time. He misses Ms. Helen's class, and probably Ms. Helen herself too.
The new teacher's approach seems to be more traditional, starting with the ABCs. And there is already practice writing the letters which I think is a bit early for Tyler. Tyler said he liked the class when I asked him afterwards. But I think the highlight today for him was seeing so many of his old classmates after the summer hiatus. It's really too bad that all of them are one year older. So when he does start school, wherever it is, he'll most likely not have a friend already in the class.
Anyhow that's it for now... For my next blog entry, I'll try to write about something else other than Tyler's classes. So far that seems to be the focus of the blog so far.... actually to put it in perspective, T's classes are really just 1 hour of the day. Guess it's just easier to focus on something self-contained like a class.
