Another School Year Begins

 Another year of school has begun. The boys are in 6th grade.  

I can't believe it, my last year with kids at Foothill Elementary school.  They are in 6th grade and loving their teacher Mrs. Tolman. 

 

She is the perfect combination of organized and fun.  She gets them excited about projects and gives them a lot of freedom in how they decided to complete their assignments.  She often let's them know all the things that are due at the end of the week and they are given free time throughout the week to work on those assignments however they wish as long as they are done by the due date.  If they finish all their work early, they spend their free time on learning games.  The boys were recently assigned a project where they had to choose a country and research about their Christmas Traditions.  Carter chose Italy and spent the night before the presentation making Italian Chirstmas cookies for everyone. 

 Camden chose India (they don't celebrate Christmas, they celebrate Diwali)- he made me get a bunch of somoas from Trader Joe's to share.  They had to make a trifold cardboard presentation and then parents and other students were all invited into the class to walk around and learn from the kids about what they had learned about each country's Christmas traditions.  I brought Liv with me and ate way to many treats from all the different countries that day. 

Liv is in 8th grade at Canyon View Junior high. 

 She had lots of friends and finding time to hang with them seems to be at the forefront of her mind. She and her friends have made it a point to take a picture together every single day of school.

  She mostly spends her time at school trying to justify me checking her out of class because she thinks they are doing nothing.  She has been a teacher aid for Steven Strong all semester and really developed a cute relationship with him.  They both love swig and were constantly making bets on swig drinks.  Steve threatened to stab her with a pencil as he did to Derek so many years ago when they were kids. 

 She loved her sewing class this year.  At the end of the term they had a class market.  They were broken into groups and each group had to sew something to sell.  When they walked into class they were each given tickets to purchase other classmates items and then they could use the tickets their earned from selling the product to buy other products.  Liv's group sewed drawstring bags and made homemade soap to put in the bags.  She said it was the most popular product!  The soap selling day and Christmas country projects happened to line up on the same day at the end of term and my kitchen was a disaster and over-run by poster boards, cookies, and soap.