Elementary School.

The 3 older kids started back to school on August 24th this year. They were all actually pretty excited about the new school year. Everyone was happy with their teachers and were looking forward to seeing their friends again. The best part for me was that summer had not reached that all time low where I am so eager for school to start because everyone is driving me crazy! It was good to start back to school without having totally lost my mind!

Ashley is in second grade. She is in a class with an amazing teacher and lots and lots of her girlfriends. She is becoming a good reader and brings home fun books every night and takes AR tests nearly every day. Her speech is also improving. Maybe just maybe this will be her last year of speech. Not too many memories of second grade for me. Ms. Pope was my teacher, my little brother was born, and I had short ugly hair (that my mom still says was her favorite!)

Mitchel is in 4th grade and actually seems to be liking it. He was excited to have the same teacher Justin had last year. His favorite part I think is that there is no homework if he uses his time wisely in class. He is still not all too interested in reading, but he has managed to find an author he likes (Andrew Clements) and is willing to read enough to get by! You may recall from reading this that 4th grade for me was kind of the pits.

Justin is in 5th grade and although he is not in a class with many of his friends, he has a great teacher who is really pushing him and its a good thing. He also has a student teacher from BYU-I who is full of energy and teaches very fun lessons (and is quite cute too I must add!). He has a fair amount of homework each night and he is very diligent about sitting down and doing his homework as soon as he gets home from school. She has them do lots of creative writing exercises and Justin has decided he might just write a novel! He is still the reader. I think that just since school started he has read well over 4000 pages.

My 5th grade year was a great one for me. I had a teacher by the name of Mr. Rudolph. He was a tall, thin African American man and he was awesome! I remember that lots of my friends were in my class and we had fun assignments. I also remember that those of us that were ahead in reading got to go down to Ms. Bennett's first grade class and read with the first graders. I thought that was so cool. I remember that writing notes became a very popular thing to do that year - I remember always writing notes to my friends and I even recall making "note boxes" out of the little square kleenex boxes and taping them to our desks. It also became very popular to have these plastic basket things that we carried around with our markers, crayons, and all sorts of fancy pens in them. I wonder how much money I had my mom spend on those pens that you had to buy at a hallmark type store. I remember that this was the first year we "switched" classes. We went to Mrs. Becker's class for science and really thought we were big time. I wish I could remember more details about Mr. Rudolph himself, b/c my memories of him and 5th grade sure are good ones. I do recall that he had served in the Vietnam War and occasionally suffered from flashbacks. It also seems to me like some teachers, administrators, or parents didn't like him b/c of all the various ways he taught us - he didn't just teach us out of the book. It seems like they thought he needed to stick to the curriculum. Maybe that is not even true, but for some reason I think that. He passed away when I was in high school and I remember feeling sad about that but thankful for having been one of his students. Hooray for good teachers that leave lasting impressions. My kids have some teachers like that this year. And that makes me happy.