New Year Adjustments
The New Year’s Party was far more disruptive to the bedtime schedule than I expected. We’re now 4 bedtimes later and the kids are still having trouble going to sleep on time. Prior to the night of staying up until 1 am they had been waking up before 8 am. Afterward they all want to sleep in until 9 or later with an accompanying delay on going to sleep. I’m fairly certain that the disruption would have been resolved more quickly if I had dragged them out of bed on schedule during the past four days, but I didn’t really want to get up early either. Oh well. School starts tomorrow and that will forcibly revert all of us into being early risers. This does not put me off having parties at the house, but I’ll be sure to go through the hassle of enforcing a bedtime on the kids at a more reasonable hour. And I’ll be more diligent about getting people back on schedule.
I am going to enjoy teaching my new primary class. They’re all 4 which means I’m allowed to hand out snacks and lessons are very simple. We cover about lesson points about three times each during the course of 45 minutes. In between the lesson points, the kids eat, do a craft, and play. It is much more relaxed than my last class where I worked hard to get 10 year olds to comprehend a more substantive lesson. Unfortunately being in the large group sharing time at the same hour as Patch meant that he attached himself to me like a little barnacle. I’m still trying to decide if that is a problem and if it is, how I’m going to go about addressing it. Also this year Gleek moved up into the older sharing time group. This means that instead of having her fidgets camouflaged by dozens of younger fidgeters, she now sticks out. She also has a new teacher, who I think will be great for her, but we now need to figure out a new set of expectations and then figure out how to help Gleek to comply. She ended up fleeing the meeting to come and find me. I’m still trying to figure out the shape of the challenge and I’m trying to figure out how I want to handle it. Fortunately there is fantastic group of teachers who are willing to help, I just need to figure out what shape the help needs to take. I’m too tired to solve it today. More thought is required.