Open House

Kayla and I went to her Open House at her school last night. It was interesting. We all met in the auditorium and then followed their schedule around to all of her classes where we listened to the teachers talk about what they were doing in the classroom that year and their expectations for 10 minutes and then the bell rang and we moved on to the next class. The kids went with us to all the classes and the teachers didn't give you any extra time to talk to them but they did give us their email addresses and phone numbers. I've also got the secret code now to go look at Kayla's test grades and homework scores every day...I'm sure she's not happy about that! I can understand why she has a hard time following her English teacher because I did too. Kayla said she told us (the parents) way more than she ever tells the kids about what she is doing. Her Algebra teacher is very young but is supposed to be really good which I hope she is because Kayla has her work cut out for her in that class. Her science teacher is a National Award Winner and said this school is by far the best in the city. She had about 20 animals in her classroom including a tarantula, and our hermit crab, which Kayla gave to her after realizing she had no interest in one. I think he's much happier now in his huge glass cage than he was on the bottom shelf of her bookshelf in a tiny cage. She's taking Planet Earth as her elective. It's a science course where they focus on new technology like web searches, Google, MapQuest, wikipedia. She's also going to teach them how to read maps and do GPS. She said she wants to teach the kids how to do the latest technological advances because that is the way the world is going and they will need to know this stuff (I agree). She also throws some global warming and other earth topics in there. I really liked her social studies teacher who said they are focusing on World History and will have a big project they will be working on for National History Day in January. Her other classes were Health and Keyboarding, which seemed to be fairly easy as long as you show up. I also got to meet some of her other friends and their parents. There's a girl who is new at the school also this year and has her locker next to Kayla's and her mom said that Kayla helped her get into her locker the first week of school. After we went to all the classes, they had a reception in the library where they had a massive book fair. I don't remember having a book fair like that when I was in school--they had everything. All of that took over two hours and we were starving. It was 8:30 before we drove through Chick-Fil-A for our homecooked meal ;).