School's out!

I can hardly believe that it has already come to an end!  It seems like just yesterday that I was walking Lil' Miss to school for the first time and holding back tears as I walked away without her.  It has been a truly amazing year, the amount she has learned and grown is mind-blowing.  I remember Kindergarten as being essentially arts and crafts time, and maybe we learned to spell our names but it is completely different now.  Lil' Miss went in knowing her alphabet, knowing her numbers up to about 20, and could spell her name.  Now that school is over she is capable of writing complete sentences, can read at 2nd grade level, can do addition and subtraction of single digit numbers and a whole lot of other things I can't list out here. 

Saying goodbye will be especially hard since her two closest friends are transferring out to a different school.  We also struggled with the idea of transferring, as I blogged about another time, but our decision was made to keep Lil' Miss in our neighborhood school.  Since she has had such a good experience and is doing so well it seems a little silly to transfer her out just because the school test score averages are relatively low.  Happily her best friend Miss E lives around the corner and we moms have already been discussing ways to keep the girls close.  Such as continuing the Friday play-dates and arranging to be in the same Girl Scout troop if both want to participate.  Nonetheless, it will still be sad to not see them at school everyday (and not just for Lil' Miss, I'll miss seeing them too!).

Lil' Miss is having an awful time with saying goodbye to her teacher Ms. W.  I think she has burst into sobbing tears daily all week.  We had thought she might get to stay with the same teacher for next year in a Kindergarten-1st grade split class, but luckily for the school enrollment has gone up for the Kindergarten and it seems that they won't need a split class.  Happily our school has some of the best 1st grade teachers in the district so whoever teaches her next year will be great, but Lil' Miss still wants her current teacher. It was heartbreaking to leave the school with my poor little one sobbing the entire way to the car.  I tried to tell her that she can visit her teacher next year, and that she is going to try to get the class together over the summer at the park but it's still not the same as having Ms. W as her everyday teacher.  I can kind of understand since it just hit me I won't get to see the kids in her class on my volunteer days anymore, I am going to miss seeing those kids every week myself!