Thalia's first day of school

I just got home from taking Thalia to school.  As always, I have mixed emotions about first days of school.  I miss homeschooling and will always think of myself as a homeschooler at heart, but for the time being, this feels like the right path for us to be on.

As I said in a previous post, we had no intention of putting Thalia in school this soon and had planned to wait until fall for her to start.  But when we saw how well she did in her school in China, it made us re-think our plans.  We didn't want for her to lose the skills that she had already developed, and a big part of that was being able to participate in group activities, sit at her desk, and do the whole school "routine."  We worried that it would be a huge adjustment later on, rather than a smaller one now.  I feel good about it, but we're always willing to reassess if things don't seem like they're going well.  For now, even before an IEP is in place, she'll be with her regular ed class for homeroom, art, music, PE, library, and that kind of thing.  She'll be in the special ed room for the other subjects.  We'll worry about how to get a greater percentage of her day mainstreamed when she starts 3rd grade in the fall, but with so little of the school year left, our thinking is that it will just give her time to get settled, get more comfortable with English, and give the rest of us more of an idea of what she's able to do and what we need to work on.  I think she's in good hands.  :o)

Thalia with her 15 pound backpack she insisted on carrying herself

Thalia and Mrs. K