The Tapler Ohana: The Groove and First Homework

We're getting into the groove of the school routine as we're about mid-way through the 2nd week of Kindergarten. Dean's still loving it, although I'm convinced they put some kind of crazy-juice into those school lunches. He has come home from school the last several days COMPLETELY wound up. I mean more hyper than I've ever seen him, like he's on crack or something (does crack make you hyper? I don't know. Speed maybe?). I don't know what it is. Joel thinks it's just the transition and he just needs some more time to get settled into things. I'm saying we give it another few weeks and then start sending home lunches and do our own little experiment. Maybe it's that damn chocolate milk!! ha! I certainly hope he's not behaving this way AT school because it's BAD. He has been super naughty from the time we get home until he goes to bed - mostly just being way more hyper than usual and not listening at all. Dean's always had a lot of energy, but this is out of character for him and a pretty sudden change. I'm sure it's just the transition and huge change in his routine, but it's about to drive me crazy!! But all of that aside, I'm glad that he's enjoying school and he's definitely loving it!

This past weekend, Dean and I made a card for Mrs. Smith to thank her for making Dean's first week of Kindergarten a success. I made the actual card and Dean wrote on the inside. He was so proud of himself for writing lower case letters, something he HATES doing!! It was pretty cute! Although his upper case letters are definitely more legible. Here's a look at his work:

Dean also had his first homework assignment this week, the "I Am Special Project". This was a project for us to do together with Dean (and we all know how much I love a project!!). We were given a piece of cardstock and instructions to "decorate this paper by adding things to it that tells us about your kindergartener. You can decorate both sides with pictures, stickers, drawings, stamps, and words". OK, well...this is kinda my thing. And we WERE given TWO sides of the paper...so...ya know. ;-) But really, I'll admit I cheated a little. You might remember we had a similar assignment when Dean was in the Turtle Class a few years ago at Children's Garden preschool. And I created a pretty cool digital scrapbook page with all of this kind of information on there. It was a really neat project and Dean still loves looking at that page. So I pulled up that layout in Photoshop and used it as a template to create a new page. I had to resize it to fit the piece of cardstock and I used all new photos and re-wrote all of the "About Dean" stuff. Then I printed it out and we decided to use it as the front side of his project. It's super cute! And for the record, it was actually Dean's idea to do this. When I explained the project to him he excitedly said "I know!" and ran to his room and got the page I had made for his Turtle Class assignment and said "I can use this". I had to convince him that it was old and we needed to change it, but he really wanted to use it. Who am I to argue with that? So he helped me pick out the pictures and he did tell me the things he wanted to say about himself. I'm sure it's way overboard and hopefully he won't have too much trouble presenting it to the class. Regardless it will be a really cool keepsake! Here's what it looked like:

Then I told Dean he needed to decorate the back of the paper himself. I told him he could draw something or we could use stickers or whatever he wanted, but it needed to be something special about him. He said he wanted to make a Solar System picture "because I looooove Space. That would be really cool, right?". Yes, Dean. That would be really cool!! He decided he wanted to draw the planets on construction paper and cut each one out and then glue it onto the paper. That lasted for about 3 planets and then he was "really really tired" and it took A LOT of encouragement to get him to finish. But he pulled through and finished. Once he finished cutting and gluing all of the planets, he decided they needed to be labeled. I was MAJORLY impressed with his labeling skills - he wrote all of the planet names himself and did an excellent job with the spelling, only misspelling Mercury, Jupiter and Neptune because he left off a letter and Saturn because he swapped the R and the U. My favorite thing though is his creative "arrowing"!! He was so particular about drawing those arrows just so. Oh, and the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, which he added with a red marker at the very end. We can't forget that!!