Samantha's first blog

Posted By pamelamyers on September 29, 2017

In Samantha’s school, the second graders do “star of the week.” Sam was super excited when she got home last Friday because she found out she was the very first star! I remember in Kindergarten they did star of the week and Samantha was almost the last kid. It was so hard for her to wait while everyone else got to have their turn. Not this year!

She was given a poster to complete and bring in on Monday. We had a lot going on that weekend prior because of her birthday, and she didn’t have a heck of a lot of time to work on it, so I helped her with some of the coloring. She filled in all the questions about herself. They may be a little hard to read, but no surprises here: her favorite color is orange, her favorite animal is a cat, her favorite food is french fries, her favorite book is No, No Kitten!, her favorite sport is none, her favorite thing to do in school is lunch, and her favorite thing to do at home is play with dolls.  My favorite section of the poster is where the kids are supposed to list three “super-cool facts” about themselves. Sam picked some good ones: I know electronics, I can build a robot, and I have 2 cats.

Her teacher asked the parents to write something about their child in the star binder. This is what I wrote:

All week Sam was allowed to bring in a show and tell item. She loved that. She mostly brought in toys (Boo Boo and Baby Ann were two that she just had to bring) but she also brought one of her electronics projects. Mark helped her practice the night before to make sure she remembered how to show the electronics project, and how to fix it if the wires came out. She told us the kids loved it!

The best part of the week though, was that she got to bring a “star guest.” On back to school night her teacher explained this to us and said that in the past parents have either talked about their jobs, read a book, and one time a student brought an older sibling or cousin or something who played college football to talk about what that was like. Sam wasn’t sure who she wanted to bring. I told her that I thought that Daddy would love to go to school with her because he was thinking they could demonstrate together how they built, programmed, and work one of the mBot robots. I told her that I would be happy to go in with her because she knows that I love to go to school, but I probably wouldn’t be very exciting, all I would likely do is read a book to her class. Sam loved the idea of Mark coming in and then sort of dismissed the idea of my going by saying, “Yeah, I mean, what are YOU going to do? Talk about your job or something?” (as she had a blech look on her face). The kids LOVED it! Mark told me the kids were freaking out they were so excited. There were a million questions, and they all were completely entranced. Sam worked the computer perfectly. Mark had a blast being in the classroom teaching again. He actually emailed Sam’s teacher and offered to come in again to do a lesson on Scratch programming and robotics sometime. Mrs. Smith thought it was a great idea and said she’d definitely be in touch. I really hope she does set it up. Not only did the kids love it, but it’s an important STEM lesson that they don’t get a lot of at this grade level. And Mark loved it, which is a treat for him. We’ll see…there may be more robots in this class’s future!

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