First Day of Third Grade

Yinghua completed its expansion project during the summer - the entryway is now three stories high instead of just one.  The historic classroom wing for all grades is now just K-4, with grades 5-8 in the newer portion.  The gymnasium has been expanded and upgraded - new lunchroom - new library - better security layout too.  What an exciting year to come!

Cherry Blossom Season at Yinghua

No cherry trees here in Minneapolis - all the celebrating was done inside at Yinghua:

Triptychs in the hallway outside the 2nd-grade classrooms

For English class, introduction to haiku

All the flower petals are actually thumbprints

Wynn with her poem

More cherry blossoms inside Wynn's classroom

With Chinese poetry hanging from the ceiling

Yinghua Chinese New Year Pageant 2014

The Chinese New Year pageant put on by Yinghua becomes more and more the capstone to our holiday season each year. We get so happy thinking about it and so excited to see what the teachers and kids have come up with.  This year's performance clocked in at 2 hours 40 minutes!

Held at Bethel University again - and this space barely holds us now! Over 500 students were participating!

 

Here's our girl!

Happy New Year 2014!

No big trip this Winter Break - the biggest journey we took this season was to Hogwarts as we introduced Wynn to Harry Potter. Finished Book 1 yesterday and showed her the first movie today.  She is still trying to get her head around the idea that we had to wait about a year and a half between the books!  ("Now, imagine that the next book we'll read sometime between third and fourth grade!")

New Year's Day was cold - we had lunch at Masu at the Mall of America, but the service was dreadfully slow.

Bored, bored, bored

The Polar Vortex descended on Minnesota today, and Governor Dayton has closed all the schools tomorrow, so Wynn and Ann are getting one more bonus day of Winter Break. They'll be picking up the house & getting ready to go back to school Tuesday...

Spelling practice at the State Fair

Much of the State Fair has been pulled down for yet another year - we love to go over after dinner while there's still sunlight for our walks

So Wynn has English class this year - they teach it as a second-language starting in 2nd Grade. The kids are all over the place with their English skills, so they split the 2nd graders into a group that needs more remedial work and a group that's ready for grade-level or above work. Wynn's in the advanced group.

That means she'll be getting a lot of English spelling words this year!  We have been practicing the usual way at home, but Ann thought of a clever way to work it into our evening walks - bring sidewalk chalk around & quiz Wynn every couple blocks!

Wynn has decided this idea is quite fun.  I wonder what other people walking and driving around the Fairgrounds must think...

 

The Senator's little cabin hasn't been moved out yet & you can walk up on the porch...  so obligatory goofball snapshot...

Loving Yinghua Academy!

Here she is Monday morning, at our front door in her uniform and ready to go to her new school.

Any worries we had about Wynn transitioning into Yinghua were put to bed Monday afternoon; she adores the place. This morning as I dropped her off, she was skipping all the way to the front door of the school. She has art and music classes several times per week, gym every day, an hour plus of math every day, and of course all the Mandarin she can drink in.  She's already begun showing off what she's learned; last night she wrote the characters for 1 through 6 for us, and then used wooden building blocks to make the symbols, too.

* proud Baba smile *

Friday afternoon I'll pick her up a little early and we'll go to her ear doctor for the post-surgical follow-up. She's not complained of pain at all over this past week - had some dry skin back behind the ear a couple nights ago, which Vaseline took care of. No fever, nausea, or any other complications, and she never needed the Tylenol with codeine that she was prescribed. (In fact, she only had a pain reliever Wednesday afternoon, and nothing since.)

She is one tough cookie.

I'm hoping she gets the all-clear to start swimming again Friday! I'm missing our Friday Family Swim Nights!

Feeling MUCH better

The bandages were off Thursday morning and she had a wonderful time with her Grandmas Thursday and Friday. She did need more nap time these past four days, but otherwise she was active and up to her usual activities.

She's not reported any pain or nausea, and has had a normal appetite this whole time. She's taking eardrops three times a day to prevent infection, and we'll get a follow-up appointment scheduled in the next few days. She's got packing on the inside of her left eardrum which will dissolve over the next couple weeks; right now she's a little hard-of-hearing on that side because of all that stuffing. Outside, there's only a small patch behind her ear where they shaved off hair and a teensy scar; if you weren't looking directly at it you'd never see it.  We have to keep the area dry until the follow-up appointment, so we carefully wash her hair - and no Family Swim Time.  That's probably been the biggest disruption this weekend.

Ann and Wynn toured Yinghua Academy Friday afternoon and she got to meet her teacher.  The first day at her new school is tomorrow! Hooray!

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!"

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...