Thursday, December 20, 2007

Halfway There

Today was Josh's last day of school before Christmas break, and I attended the class "tasting party" to celebrate. Because this program can't celebrate any holidays (for reasons too complex for this blog), the teacher had all of the kids' parents bring in a food their family likes to eat. Here's Josh standing with his plate of pancakes.

More importantly, however, are the differences I saw in Josh while I was with him and his class today. It's astounding. He sat with his class and participated when the teacher led them in a song (see the picture below--Josh is off to the right). He also talked to the other kids, did not run around the class crazily and did what he was told. You can see in the picture above that he has written his own name (sort of) on the place card. For many 4-year-olds, all of this would be considered normal, but for Josh this is incredible progress. We are deeply grateful for Josh's teachers and this pre-school program.

And to counteract the scary angel pictures, here are Josh and Molly giving me their best "duh" looks.

1 comment:

corinne said...

It's funny - I substituted in a preschool classroom today, and, even though two children were out due to Eid, the instructional assistant is Hindu, and a couple of the other kids are from various non-Christian backgrounds, the book that I was given to read them during story time was "The Biggest, Most Beautiful Christmas Tree." The big holiday party with parents is tomorrow. They also wore costumes and had a Halloween parade in October; even though celebrating certain holidays is always an issue in public schools, apparently it's fairly normal in this one!

One of the little girls drew a picture for me today; out of the blue, she said "I'm drawing God," took a black crayon, and drew a moustache and beard on one of her stick people. So now I have a picture of a smiling Jesus, three smiling children holding choir books, a flower, the sun, and some snowflakes :).

I'm glad that you and Molly got to have some fun in Josh's class today, too! It looked like there were some pretty cool drawings at his table :).