Avery's First Day of 1st Grade

Avery's a 1st grader now! I can't believe we've now entered the (very long) section of our lives of full day school. Crazy!

Here he is in all his handsomeness on the first day (which was back on Sept. 7th)


Ah, what a nice smile


But Avery made a deal with me that if he gave me some nice faces then I had to take his picture being silly. (There's even one of him punching himself!) Also, I've never explained to him about modeling for the camera, so I think it's hilarious that he understands the sequence of holding a pose until you hear the click then change pose and hold and so on. So, as per his request, he gets all of these next pictures:








We paused a moment to grab some shots of all three boys. Stuck in the bright side-light sun, but oh well I wasn't going to get them (stinker Emmett) anywhere else and what I did get didn't last long anyway.








Alright, time to go.


*sigh* he's so big.


Once at school he was ready to dump me, but I saw tons of parents inside so I followed him anyway at a distance (and good thing too since I had to re-direct him the right way to his class). Then I just got a quick shot of him checking out his new digs because he was already trying to be too cool and refusing to acknowledge my existence. Thankfully, that's the last I've seen of that and he's happy to see me again.


Based on his experience at the private Kindergarten he went to, I was super worried about him and public 1st grade. He had a lot of trouble with distractions and inability to focus on work. Getting into the public school would mean a lot less teacher attention on him and I was worried about that compounding the lack of attention and/or him slipping through the cracks. On top of that, the tonsil surgery absolutely KILLED his speech and I was terrified of what that would mean socially etc. Thankfully, we did exercises to retrain his mouth and he made rapid improvements. He's back to where he was pre-surgery now.
As for being a "good student" I'm so pleased to find that Avery is doing amazing in school. He's one of the best kids in his class behavior-wise. One of the behavior motivating systems the teacher has is a set of 5 colored cards per child that they can lose each day. For each day they keep all their colors they get a single jellybean the following morning and 5 days in a row of keeping all their colors means a certificate to bring home. Of the 5 colors they can lose each day, Avery has only lost one so far this year when he got a little too rowdy with a friend. A handful of kids still have a perfect score, but Avery knows he's right there close to them. The mom of one of the boys in Avery's class who was at the private K with him last year even went home and told his mom how Avery is never in trouble now. I thought that was pretty funny. It's great because I feel like he's in a good positive cycle now. He obviously pays a lot of attention to the reward systems and best of all he takes pride in being one of the "good kids" which I think makes a world of difference. Hopefully he keeps it up as the work load increases over the year and he can improve in his focusing.