Today was the first day of school!
Here's the bus as it delivers the children back home. We always know when the bus is about to arrive, because a neighborhood German Shepherd shows up in our yard to wait for it. Apparently, he first meets the bus on the other side of the neighborhood, then takes a shortcut to beat it over here.
I see that this is either a new bus or has a new roof, because I don't recall the vents on top. Speaking of ventilation, August is much too hot for children to have to go to school! They should be swimming!
8 comments:
Hmmm. Air-conditioned classrooms are one way to beat the heat. Unless, of course, you fail to turn in your homework!
What a great dog!
True, but it's too hot on the playground in August, and those buses don't have air conditioning for the long ride home, not to mention that the classrooms aren't that cool with doors opening all the time and if they don't turn on the AC really, really early!
Get the brats back in a school room. LOL.
Driving through school zones adds 15 more minutes to my drive to work. I always dread it.
Jim, I bet there are plenty of people who are thinking what you wrote! LOL Especially parents? Been there, but oh how I loved my summers that began at the end of May and didn't end til after Labor Day!
I know, Janet. I am angered by the whittling away of childhood that has been done by increasing the school year. I want to ask, "What, exactly, can you accomplish with those extra precious days?" Oh, man! I can tell you what they WON'T do with them. It seemed that last year my daughter spent one half of the year watching movies and the other half being drilled for the SAT. By golly, I had enough of that! I'm teaching her myself this year!
LOL Nikki! I thought I was the only one who thought that way! Ours watched more movies than I thought "necessary" too. All but one is out of the system now, and I noticed that there are no TVs in the room at all anymore. Yay!
As for school year length, I'm sure it helps save $ for parents who both work outside the home. We tried a part-time Kindy & full-time Kindy. The child who went to part-time Kindy covered just as much material in 3-4 hour day and a much shorter year as the full-time Kindy kid in a 7.5 hour day (not including riding the bus...add another 1.5 hours). They both started the same first-grade reader, although my full-time K kid finished the K reader and had no more reading the last several weeks of school. Plus, the part-time K kid had formal music training every day!
Yep, a well-rounded education can certainly be achieved with fewer hours of instruction and our kids need more free time to learn on their own. I will tell you what, not one of my treasured childhood memories involves school. Mine are all wrapped up in hours by the creek bank observing nature, building rafts, and digging in the mud. Having freedom to think, explore and ask questions is at the root of a good education. What we need to focus on is encouraging our kids to be lifelong learners.
Nikki, We didn't have a creek, because we lived in the middle of town, but we did have an all-dirt backyard where we built roads for cars and trucks and dug ponds for toy boats, even built pond dams. Then there was the picnic table where we played restaurant and made mud pies and the playhouse where we built an attic out of fiberglass board or something similar. Plus, my older brother built me a kitchen sink with real running water (pumped up from a five-gallon jug). We had a "hospital" on the screened porch and our wagons, bikes and tricycles were the ambulances for hauling in the injured. We live in the country now, and my kids did have a big backyard for playing ball and nearby woods where the neighborhood kids built a fort. Oh, we also made our own skateboards, Barbie furniture and doll clothes, along with help from our parents who didn't have to haul us around to a ton of organized activities. Scouts & and a couple of years of dance are the only extracurricular thing we did in elementary school. On weekends, we (kids only) had rummage (yard or garage nowadays) sales to make money. My own children missed a lot of that no thanks to video games, but they did enjoy summer at a pool, which I thought was well worth the money!
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