Book recommendation: Home is a Roof Over a Pig

I recently finished reading an interesting new book, Home is a Roof Over a Pig, by Aminta Arrington.  She's also a blogger, a teacher, and an adoptive parent of a girl from China.

Instead of raising her youngest child through a "normal American life", however, she and her husband and their other two school-age siblings moved to China not long after the adoption.  It's an interesting twist on addressing the desire by adoptive parents to not let a child's birth culture slip away, and pretty gutsy.  The book is a fascinating read - I've posted a full review at weninchina.com -  and do recommend it especially for other families who are in the China adoption track.

Will we eventually move overseas?  Wynn's in a great school, and is getting lots of Chinese acculturation there.  (She doesn't even notice anymore when we're around Chinese families speaking Mandarin in places like IKEA ... it's completely normal to her.  Also, this happens a lot more now that we're living in the city...)  But, Yinghua only goes to 8th grade.  And Ann and I may want to do new things with our careers, too. (And jinkies, we just moved into this new house!) So, not today and not for a while. But it may happen, and this book gives us some insights into what that kind of transition might look like.

Kindergarten Switch!

Here's what the building looks like without snow.

From back in January - Wynn had a great time.

This is what we in the education business call a "text-rich environment". No worries about how much teachers can put up on the walls here...

A sudden change of fortune Friday night - we got a call from Yinghua Academy, the Mandarin immersion school from the Minneapolis district asking if we were still interested in having Wynn attend!


As you recall back in January 2011, we toured this building and put Wynn in the enrollment lottery for getting into one of the two Kindergarten classes they had available. In February we found out her number was too high, and so we began the enrollment process for our local White Bear Lake elementary. Well, it turns out that Yinghua was able to get more money and more native-Mandarin teachers, so they now offer four Kindergarten classes.


Still, it took two kids to leave the school before Wynn's number finally came up to the top of the list.


Ann and I had to wrestle hard with the decision Friday night and Saturday morning - Wynn just left the preschool she'd attended for four years and all her friends from there; she's been so enthusiastic about her teacher and being in a big building these past two weeks; and the building where she's at does get good test scores and has a strong community support base. Plus, it's literally five minutes' drive from our house.


Yinghua has a solid math and language program, also very strong test scores. And she would learn Mandarin now - White Bear doesn't even touch it partially until middle-school. Yes, the commute would be longer for both me and Ann - her especially; the school's about 10-15 minutes on the far side of my office. Certainly the parent profile of this new school is different - they've seen a huge number of adopted kids. We'll be among fellow travelers at parent meetings.


We don't have any reservations about Wynn's resilience or her ability to thrive in a new environment - but it is going to be hard on her this particular week, with her second ear surgery on Wednesday (more on that later). She was so gung-ho on making new friends here in White Bear, and now she's going to have to say goodbye already.


But we drove her past the new school Saturday afternoon, and will be taking her there again Tuesday evening for "curriculum night."  Ann is going to try to arrange a walk-through at the school with Wynn Friday afternoon to meet the teachers & staff. Wynn's first day will be next Monday, the 26th.


With our acceptance, we've already fired off a list of questions to the administrator on how to get Wynn up and running, figure out her speech-therapy schedule, set up extended-day hours, and such. We've got to pick up fresh supplies again, and this school has uniforms that we have to scramble to find in her size. Can't say I'm looking forward to all the paperwork, either, both on the admission side for Minneapolis and the transfer-out side for White Bear.


Still, a new door has opened on Wynn's future. It's what we wanted for her in the first place. And when something as pleasantly unexpected like this happens - like how we were matched with Wynn in the very beginning - we have to jump through that door.

First Day of Kindergarten!

She has been pumped up for this day since about the middle of last week; literally skipping around the block last night as we took Shadow for his walk!

No anxieties at drop-off, great report from her teacher, pickup was easy as pie. She said, "Kindergarten rocks!"

Pre-K Graduation!

Wynn's preschool graduation event was tonight - quite the production for two classes; about 30 kids total. Everyone got to say a few words about what they liked best:

No anxiety about standing in front of a microphone at all. The gown swallowed up her arms and almost the rest of her body, too.

Wynn with her teacher this year, Miss Amy.

And here's proud Mom and Baba with Wynn in her cap and gown.

And just because, each class did a couple musical numbers. Here's a video of Wynn's Elvis piece, done with the other friends from her classroom. The cap just would not stay on her sleek hair - but trouper she is, she kept singing and dancing...

Kindergarten Round-Up

Tonight right after work we went to the elementary school that Wynn will most likely be attending this fall. It was an open-house night for all the new kindergartners.

The teachers had all sorts of activities ready for the kids to do. Ann and I checked out all the materials up on the walls; the Smartboard setups; the books and games in the cubbies. We're both in the education business - this is what we do when we walk into a school...

Wow, she has really become skilled at coloring in the past several months!

Playground equipment of awesomeness!

Big grassy lawn and ball field out back, too.

The sun finally came out when we got home, so I took Wynn and Shadow for a walk around the block and down to the neighbors' dock.

Chinese Immersion School

At the end of January, we visited an open-house at Yinghua Academy, a Chinese-immersion charter school in the Minneapolis district, in the Nordeast neighborhood. In fact, this was the first Chinese immersion charter school in the USA just ten years ago. Today it has grown to about 360 students in Kindergarten through 8th grade (so about two classrooms for each grade). We had heard great things about the school, so we wanted to see if it was the kind of place Wynn would do well in.

For the younger grades, the school teaches everything except gym, music, and art entirely in Mandarin Chinese, right from Day One. Most of the kids who go there are not Asian, but they figure things out really quickly.

A very text-rich environment - some pre-printed materials there, but most of what we saw on the walls had been adapted from English-language material.

Students' work was displayed EVERYWHERE on both floors. So much creativity!

A half-hour demonstration was performed in each Kindergarten class to show the kids and parents what a typical instructional activity looked like. The teacher and her assistants led the kids through a "morning greeting" activity, and then a short lesson which incorporated learning the names of various animals and the words for run, jump, and walk. Wynn held back for a couple moments to observe what was going on, and then she jumped right into the activity, raising her hand and volunteering. She had a great time. And her speech clarity in Mandarin was really quite good after she had some practice - as good if not better than her English clarity.

Enrollment at the school is done by lottery, as there just aren't enough classrooms to accommodate all the demand. We had already filled out the paperwork, and put it into the basket after the demonstration - yes, we knew this would be an ideal place to challenge her (even if we didn't know how the transportation was going to work.)

On Friday, Feb 11 the lottery was conducted and results posted on the school's website. Unfortunately, Wynn did not get the lucky number - they received a record number of applications this year. If the school were twice as large, she would have gotten in.

She's disappointed. We're disappointed. It would have been a great match. So Plan A for Kindergarten isn't going to work. It seems Plan B (continue at her excellent preschool, which offers a K program "on paper") isn't going to work either, as there hasn't been enough family interest there to get a class going for the 2011-2012 school year. So we're going to have to develop Plans C and D in the next few weeks...