First Day of First Grade!

What a difference between the first day of kindergarten and the first day of first grade: for both daughter and mother! Cora waltzed on into first grade with the confidence that comes from age and experience. :) One of the advantages (in my opinion) of the SI program she's in is that her classmates remain the same from year to year. It's nice to know the other kids and some of their parents already, and to know the dynamics of the group. We're excited for another great year of school for her!

Doesn't her new hairstyle look nice? She picked it out herself. :) 

Cora's Kindergarten Art

Kindergarten Reflections

Last day of kindergarten!

First day of kindergarten last August

The bus-stop gang: a lively crew to start each day with!

 I wish I had some fun stats to share about how much Cora has grown or changed this year, but I didn't do a great job keeping records. I know she started the year with a number of missing teeth, lost a few more along the way, and has since replaced all but two that we are still waiting for. Total lost to date: 8!
I know she's grown at least 1/2 and inch since her birthday in January. She got a big hair cut this winter, and now you can see in the pictures her hair is as long today as it was last August.

On a more exciting note, she has learned so much in school. I'm so impressed with how well she handled this year. It was a big step of faith to put her in 1)Spanish immersion and 2) all-day every-day kindergarten. She had to start all over in a new school and make new friends in a class that had been together for at least one year of preschool. She had to adjust to being away from home for much of the day, every day. (I think that was a harder adjustment for me than for her!) She had to adjust to everything being taught in Spanish, learning to read and write and do math and other subjects in Spanish, and at the end of the year to only speak Spanish in the classroom. Overall, she sailed through the year without too much trouble. What an answer to prayer!

As a person with an invested interest in foreign language acquisition, it has been a fascinating year for me to watch the process. At this point, Cora can already carry on a simple but long conversation about most daily activities with me in Spanish. Her accent and pronunciation are impressive but the grammatical accuracy is like speaking with a 3 year old (but after only 9 months of academic immersion!). Spanish speakers would understand what she means even though she might say the equivalent of "I likes a apple." As with anyone learning a language at any point in their life, that will improve with time and more target language exposure. She has also transferred a lot of the language skills to English on her own. She enjoys writing notes to friends and sounds out the words in English (however she's not learning English phonics yet).

In short, Cora has really enjoyed kindergarten. She seemed to get along well with her classmates and teachers and made a couple close friends, too. But I'm excited to have her home with us for the summer! Let summer vacation begin!

Some October Fun

Hello! from the Bierma kids!

Peter is getting into puzzles. It's so much fun to watch him work it out and  do the puzzles over and over again!

Cora's class took a field trip to the Calvin Nature Preserve, which is almost in our backyard. I had fun going along as a  chaperon.

Trick or Treating with some of our friends and their kids. Calvin's apartments put together a family friendly candy collecting evening called "Light in the Night."

Addie is a happy baby. She smiles easily and often!

Early this month we went to farm tour and breakfast at a large dairy farm near Allegan. It was a cold, rainy day, but fun anyway! Cora said "You should write 'stinky, too'! From the cows." Our city noses weren't used to the farm smell.

The tracker shuttle from the parking lot (aka cleared corn field) to the farm tour was a highlight !

So was seeing the all the big tractors

Getting so big!

Peter had to get in on Addie's 4 month picture: good perspective 

Addie is rolling herself back and forth from back to tummy. She prefers  to sleep on her tummy, now that she can get herself there! (Cora is helping me edit this post and she said "and write 'Cora loves Addie'")

For some reason Blogger keeps uploading pictures like this...even though I save them correctly on my computer before loading them here. Oh well! Look how big Addie is getting!

At Addie's 4 month checkup last week she weighed in at over 15 lbs and very long -  in the 95 percentile for girls her age! She is doing great and developmentally right on track. She is eating rice and oatmeal baby food and getting the hang of eating from a spoon!

Cora is using quite a bit of Spanish at home. It's fun to hear the phrases or words that she is picking up. It's really nice that I can understand her! She came home from school the other day saying she was thirsty. I asked her what she wanted to drink and she replied, "leche con chocolate" which is Spanish for chocolate milk!

Bienvenidos a Kindergarten

Cora started Kindergarten this year. We easily decided that she would attend Grand Rapids Christian Elementary, but they offer a plethora of options for kindergarten and for some reason we had a very hard time making and sticking with a decision! One of the options available is Spanish Immersion, but since she did not attend the SI preschool we had to put her name in a lottery drawing for 2 open slots in the kindergarten class. Her name was drawn 3rd, so she was first on the waiting list. So at that point we thought she would be going to kindergarten 3 days a week, but two weeks later the school called and said that one person declined the spot in Spanish Immersion so it was available to Cora if we wanted it. After deciding to go for it, we then debated whether to also have her go to a Spanish Enrichment class in the morning, since the SI Kindergarten is only a half-day program. At first we didn't want to do it, afraid that it would be too much for her to go all day every day and, honestly, not quite ready to let go that much  more of our little girl! 

Through this summer we decided that it would be best for her to do the morning Enrichment class to help her get caught up with the rest of the class in her acquisition of Spanish and possibly even help her excel. Also because bringing her to school in the middle of the day posed a number of complications for me with Peter and Addie. And, while I miss Cora while she's gone all day, Peter is much easier to manage when he's not competing or trying to prove himself to big sister Cora. This summer was wonderful and I would not change a thing about it. I wish we could live permanently like we did this summer! But I often explained to people that it wasn't adding a baby to the family that made things difficult, but rather having Cora and Peter home together all the time. We definitely got used to it and I loved having everyone home every day, but on the occasions where Cora was gone for a few hours, Peter turned into a different, more mellow child. This was a case where we had to make the decision that would be best for the whole family, and it seemed that this was the best, as  far as we could see. Since Peter still naps in the afternoon, he gets some more focused attention from me in the morning and seems to thrive with this calmer time. Let's not deny that it's also a little easier for me in general to have just Peter and Addie to run errands and such. 

Cora was ready for the big first day of kindergarten. She was a little bit subdued during breakfast, but bravely went through the motions of getting ready to go to school. At one point she said her stomach hurt a little bit. I told her that I sometimes when I'm a little bit excited and a little bit nervous my stomach hurts. She thought for a moment and said, "I think that's how I feel. A little nervous and a little excited." 

I was very proud of her! 

There was no bus transportation for the first week so I got to bring her to school. I enjoyed being able to see how the morning routine goes and to be there for her for the first few days. She gets her own locker to keep her backpack and gym shoes in.

What a big girl she is! We're so proud of her. She is at a new school again this year and will have to make all new friends. After the first couple of days she came home talking about a couple girls in her class and who she plays with at recess. 

We are praying for good friends for her at school, for a year without academic hurdles as she acquires a new language, and also for her teachers, Sra. Wolf and Sra. Marquez. Senora Wolf is the classroom teacher and Sra. Marquez is the aide. Sra. Wolf is having a baby in November so they are still looking for a sub for November through January! Praying for that also!

May Blessings

What a month May was! Brad celebrated the end of the first year of Seminary with an overnight canoe/kayak trip with 3 other guys from seminary. I think the following picture is supposed to have the caption "This is the life"

It was a well planned and executed adventure, but an adventure none the less. They covered 50 miles on the Thornapple River with a fully-loaded canoe and two kayaks.

 Cora also finished a year of school! Here she is with her preschool teachers Ms. Illiana and Ms. Joyce. 

 With some of her friends: ?, Sharon, Tayse, Cora and Daisy. Her teachers said this was a wonderful class and you can see the sense of camaraderie here!

 Cora herded all her classmates together for me to take a picture of the whole class!

 Peter is growing up so much. When I think of a new baby coming I realize how big he really is! Not the baby anymore. He loves to help me vacuum the dining room floor!

 We enjoyed a day of Tulip Time festivities in Holland. Despite the fact that most of the tulips had bloomed early and lost their petals by the time the festival came around, it was fun to have a blast from the past and share some of the traditions with Cora, Peter and Brad. 

Below: we sampled some Dutch food: croquetten, "pigs in a blanket", oliebollen, currant bun with edam cheese.  

 We watched the Musiekparade (Parade of Bands) despite the rain. The kids loved it!

 My Alma Mater: Holland Christian High School. Always a nice band, but I have to admit that the Holland High School marching band in their wooden shoes is pretty cool!

A time to sow: Cora has been saving seeds from any fruit we ate all winter until they turned moldy. So we asked Grandpa S. if she could help him with his garden and she was very excited about this. She thought she would get to grow apples, oranges, grapefruit...until we explained that they grow on trees and take many many years to produce fruit. She agreed that planting green beans that she could help pick and eat later this summer was a better option! 

Escuelita

Well, it's finally decided: Cora is going to attend Grand Rapids Christian Elementary School for kindergarten this fall. She was chosen via lottery to have the opportunity to be in the Spanish Immersion program, which was one of our choices. We weighed the pros and cons back and forth and decided to go for it. So she will attend school every day, but only in the afternoons. Her teacher will be speaking entirely in Spanish to the class and she will be learning to read and write in Spanish! In the SI program they start incorporating English phonics in second grade, so for the next two years it will be entirely Spanish.

One of the things that worried us is that she will be joining a class of students who have all (except for Cora and one other student) been in Spanish Immersion preschool for a whole year together and with the same teacher they will have for kindergarten. That means two things: she will be "behind" and she will be the "new girl". I was able to connect with the teacher and explained that I speak Spanish well enough (ha!) to help Cora learn some over the summer, even though I know we could never get her "caught up" to what the rest of the class has learned and acquired over the course of a school year. She advised me to focus on helping her learn the alphabet sounds in Spanish, numbers 1-20, shapes and colors. You can see the teacher's webpage here for what the preschoolers are doing and have learned.

I devised a plan to start working on this already, since I figure that with the lack of schedule that summer-time and a newborn baby will bring we better get some work done now. My challenge is that Cora has not been interested in learning explicitly from me and I am geared toward teaching in a high school setting. Not that I never tried to make things fun when I was a teacher but the fact is that high schoolers don't always appreciate goofy or silly and they (well, many of them) understand that their job at school is to learn the necessary material and many are motivated internally either to get good grades for one reason or another or to actually learn the language. Cora loves to play. Vocab lists and flashcards are not going to work. This is probably normal for a 5 year old! But my task is to help her acquire as much as I can, while not forcing or frustrating her and keeping our relationship as mother-daughter healthy.

My plan is called "Escuelita" which means "Little School". We've been spending 30 minutes each day doing Escuelita while Peter is napping . We've been doing it for about 2 weeks now and I think she mostly enjoys it. Today I was planning on skipping it since it is Sunday but she asked for it! We've been starting out with a little welcome song and then filling in "El Calendario" and practicing saying in Spanish, for example, "Today is Sunday, May 6" which would be "Hoy es el domingo, el seis de mayo." Then we do some different activities to practice numbers 0-10, the colors red, blue, yellow and orange, and letters a, b, and c. I mostly try to incorporate games like I spy for colors, or collecting items in each color and then counting how many red things, blue things, etc. She made a sticker book of the numbers 0-10 and has been very proud to read it to Daddy a few times. We'll incorporate more numbers, colors and letter, and then also eventually shapes as we go on.

At the end of the 30 minutes she gets a "moneda", a coin from Chuck E Cheese, and she gets to choose 30 minutes of either tv, a computer game or playing a game on my ipod. After she collects 20 coins she will get to go spend them at Chuck E Cheese. Maybe we didn't need the double reward system (the instant and the delayed/long-term), but I wasn't sure how she was going to respond initially and I feel like this will be a big accomplishment for both of us to just keep at it day after day.

So, I'm excited for her to have this opportunity but please pray for her for the challenges I mentioned earlier. All of her preschool class from this year is dispersing to different schools for kindergarten so she would be having to join a new school anyway, but I pray that she will be able to slide into the class, socially, without trouble and will find a really good friend. Also that the challenges of being in an immersion class won't overwhelm and discourage her but will instead invigorate and inspire her! I dream of someday being able to do a week long service project somewhere in Latin America together when she is old enough to come along and both of us being able to communicate fluently with the people!