Kindergarten!

We have a kindergartener!  I still can't believe it that he's in kindergarten.  There are days I look at him and wonder how the time just went by so quickly, but there are other days when he says stuff or does stuff and I think to myself, how can he only be a kindergartener?

For Matthew, one of the highlights of being in kindergarten is riding the bus!  For the past two years when we would drive him to school, he would always see school buses driving around and ask when he would get to ride the bus.  Lucky for him, kindergarten would be the year.  We live less than a mile from his school, but we were offered bus transportation and it happened to work out perfectly where we can get him off on the bus and then drive Sophia to school right afterwards to get her there just in time/a few minutes late (they go to different schools).

So far, he likes kindergarten.  His "best friend" is Jack.  We met him on the first day of school when we were waiting outside to go into his class.  His other friend that he mentions more frequently is Memphis.  His teacher's name is Mrs. Trexler and he also has a Chinese teacher named Hu lăoshī.  A very cool thing about his elementary school is that he gets 50 minutes of Mandarin everyday.  The name that his teacher gave him is Xiǎomǐ (little rice??  why that is, I'm not sure).  At first, he wasn't excited about learning Chinese at all but now he comes home everyday and I hear him say at least one or two things in Mandarin - and if we're lucky, we'll hear a song that he learned.  Here's a video of him singing a body parts song (in his opera voice!?  don't know why he does this, but it's kind of hilarious!) 

Here's what it's suppose to sound like in the very likely event that you have no idea what he's singing - for the non-Mandarin speaking readers, he's saying "eyes, nose, ears and mouth, ears and mouth, ears and mouth.  Eyes, nose, ears and mouth, hand and leg."

There's actually quite a bit of homework for kindergarten - he has something assigned every Monday - Thursday and on Friday, he brings home a folder of all his work for the week and there's a weekend assignment that needs to be completed and brought back to school on Tuesday.  It's not rocket science or anything, but it still takes time and patience to sit down and do it.  So far it's been write a letter (capital and lowercase) 5 times, and then draw something that rhymes with [whatever word] (speaking of rhymes, he's in this phase where he makes everything rhyme.  if you ask him a question that only requires a one word response, he'll make a whole rhyme out of it - for example if his answer was 'no', he would say: noey doey in my toey or if the answer was 'yes', he would yessy bessy sesserory - makes absolutely no sense, but he has so much fun saying it) or count to [whatever number] backwards.  The weekend homework assignment is a little more involved - usually involves cutting/pasting/printing stuff out (since we don't many newspapers/magazines on hand).  So far he's been okay at completing his homework.  He's willing to sit down and do it, but is easily distracted.  We'll have to work on that as he gets more homework and/or as his homework gets a little more difficult.

So enough about school for now - he's a couple pictures to catch up on what he did over the summer months.

We did a lot of bike riding this summer.  So much that not even a flooded trail at the park could stop him from biking.

We went to Lego Land in San Diego and he got to drive a car on his own.

He got to experience the waves of the Pacific Ocean when we went to LA.

He participated in a weekly summer soccer clinic that got rained out so many times that it actually extended into the first week of school.

And finally, we went on a family cruise to the Bahamas in August and the one thing he talks about most from that trip is going on the waterslide!