School Days - Grade 2 Edition

I cannot believe another year of school is (almost) behind us.  E had a great year and progressed so much with his school work, and had some fun along the way.  He was in Grade 2 and continued on with the French Immersion program.  I have enjoyed practicing my own French conversing with him. I still have my French-English dictionary from high school and we use it to check words that we don't know.  

His reading in both French and English greatly improved over the year, both thanks to his teacher and us (!).  Although we could always do more practice reading at home, we did do quite a bit of extra reading with him and it helped.   His teacher recognized that he needed extra help early on, and he attended extra reading classes and was in the lunchtime reading club once a week in the second term.  It really helped and when he was reading at home with us, I could tell he was trying out different techniques to figure out what the word was. Dave also started reading the Harry Potter books to E at night, which was also encouraged by E's friends' enjoyment of that series too.  We need to remind ourselves to keep with the reading throughout the summer, even when we are busy, so he will not fall behind next year. 

E does still need help with his writing, both in terms of actual handwriting, knowing the French words (and how to spell them), and ideas for composition.  This is definitely something we will work on this summer.  There are certain things he still forgets to do, like writing b's and d's backwards or forgetting a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence.  I keep telling him that he needs to figure this stuff out for Grade 3 next year, these mistakes won't be acceptable.  His teacher did back me up and say by the middle of Grade 3, they will start deducting points for those types of things.  

His favourite subject is math.  The way they do math problems is so strange (to me). There is a word problem, where the answer is quite simple, but they need to write out what information they have, what problem they need to solve, and then show how they got the answer.  It seems overly complicated to me but I guess they are trying to be problem solvers which is more than just solving a bunch of equations. 

We met with his teacher a few times during the year and she always had good things to say about him.  Even with some scholastic challenges, he is always happy and willing to help out.  He has a good group of friends that he plays such imaginative games with.  I don't follow what he talking about half of the time, but they seem to be having a good time.  

Cross country race

Crazy kids

Movie night in the gym

Dinner with a buddy

Christmas concert.

Watching the hoop and skipping show after school one day.

He did a bunch of great artwork at the lunchtime art classes we signed him up for. 

We are ready for summer!!