The Po Show

First Grade Afternoon

As part of National Education Week, teachers at our school invite parents in to see their children's classrooms in action. Today I went to Tessa's class for math period.

It was so remarkable. Mrs. Andrade is so incredibly enthusiastic and innovative and just really, really cool. She doesn't dumb things down at ALL to these six year olds, some of whom do not have the strongest English language skills. I can see she has high expectations, and the kids really rose to the occasion.

They were studying Geometry, and they called it that. They looked at similarities and differences between and among shapes, talked about shapes such as a rhombus, trapezoid, and hexagon, and she talked about "collecting data to help you determine your answer." What perfect language for my child, daughter of a stat geek social scientist!

Tessa was so happy to have me there. She actually gave an excited gasp when I walked in the door. She kept glancing over at me, waving, and beaming. She made no effort to show off for me, but she was always quick to raise her hand for every question. It was so gratifying to see her in this wonderful classroom environment.

After an hour, they cleaned up their "Power Polygons" and got ready to leave for specials. Half, including Tessa, were off to computer lab, while the others were off to the Nature Center (a room with hamsters, guinea pigs, a tortoise, bunnies, a parrot, fish, and mice, with a full time staff member to teach the kids all kinds of wonderful things about animals).

A wonderful afternoon with the first grade!