School

I have been waiting to better describe school until we have a good picture of the kids in their uniforms.  I think that they got off really easy.  Many of the private schools' girls uniforms include a skirt and a many layers of tights and the boys have to wear ties.  As my brother says - the picture will tell the story.

 Jonathan is sporting the traditional boys look, Elisa has on the gym day look, and Renee is wearing the girls' uniform.  Pretty simple.

So the school is much more chaotic than we would have imagined.  Apparently, at least in Renee's class there are a lot of discipline problems or at least a lot of noise and yelling.  Rob says that the teachers yelling is something that he encountered in BA as well.  Renee has probably had the best and worst experiences.  She has been asked to several play dates for after school and seems to pal around with a group of girls.  Academically, math and science (and English) are much too easy for her, Spanish and Social Studies are hard, music is disappointing because they only had place in the choir for her where she would rather do an instrument, and gym was disappointing because the boys get to do the more rigorous activities.  Hopefully we'll get her involved in gymnastics and we'll keep looking for a musical outlet.  Jonathan seems to be a star already.  Somehow he was elected to be Vice President of his class and even more amazing is that he made a goal while playing soccer.  Apparently, the first day he didn't have an answer to "What is your futbal team?"  He'll have one by the end of the month.  His trauma was that his teacher asked that he get a hair cut so that she could see his eyes (and he see hers) and the barber cut off more than he wished.  Elisa is trudging along in 1st grade but we haven't gotten much feedback from her.

The two older kids are getting semi-private tutoring in Hebrew because they are behind their classmates who have had several years of Hebrew already on a daily basis.  Apparently they are starting from the beginning and Renee is bored but hopefully it will speed up.  Here, girls have their Bat Mitzvahs at 12 and since she is in the 6th grade the girls are all having Bat Mitzvahs.  She was invited to one next weekend and from what I can make out it is a short service on Saturday afternoon followed by a dance party.  Renee is being a good sport about it and is even going to go over to a girls' house to try on dresses.  We'll see where that goes.

The school has something called Centro de Padres which is loosely a PTO.  They run a store that sells the uniforms and school supplies and apparently help run some activities.  The store is open every morning from 7:30-9:30 and Moms volunteer and drink coffee together.  I spent some time with them this morning getting supplies for the kids and asked if I could help them some mornings.  I figure it would be good to get integrated into the school and learn how to say the blue folder with the spring clip in Spanish (there are three different types of clips!).  We'll see where that goes as well.

We got the official school calendar that lists both the national and the Jewish holidays that they have off.  They really add up.  I found it humorous that the Hebrew Institute takes off the following national holidays:

Asuncion de la Virgen (August 15th)
Evangelico (October 31st - doesn't quite translate as Halloween)
Immaculada Concepcion

Try explaining #1 and #3 to my kids!