The Harrer Happenings: Last Day of Preschool for Ellie

Today was Ellie's last day of preschool at Meher Montessori. Although she does start summer school on Monday...kinda anticlimatic. After summer school and a couple weeks of camp, she will be starting kindergarten at our neighborhood school, Webster Elementary, in August.

Just over two years ago, after we moved from Boston, Ellie started at Meher. Immediately we knew this place was perfect for her and for us. She has thrived in the environment at Meher and with the teachers. She went from a kid who didn't like to color to one who was writing her name within less than two months once she started. Now she's reading, writing full sentences in cursive (by sounding out the words), knows all the provinces of Australia (and other geography trivia), doing addition, subtraction, and multiplication and is in love with school and learning. I can't be more proud of her.

Today at school they had a little graduation ceremony. The "graduates" were some of Ellie's friends who finished their kindergarten year at Meher and will be starting in first grade. As Ellie is doing kindergarten at Webster she technically didn't graduate from the school's Montessori primary program. So we celebrated her last day as a Moving On Day.

The ceremony was really cute. The program started with the kids who took an extracurricular music class playing on their recorders or singing Mary Had A Little Lamb (link to video if not working below). Ellie had been a bit nervous and earlier in the week had declared that she didn't want to play her recorder. But she asked to practice with me and then she decided she wanted to play. And she did a great job.

After the music class played, all the kids in the school moved to the stage and they sang four songs. The theme of the ceremony was Shining Bright. All the kids did well (even the young 2 year olds!). Ellie, however, carried the singing. She knew every word to every song and was VERY enthusiastic. Nick leaned over to me during the singing and said, "She sings like she's a trumpet player" meaning she was over confident, loud, and rushed every beat. After the ceremony all the parents came up to us and told us how great, energetic, entertaining, and awesome Ellie did. In the video below (or link if not working) you can hear me and Nick giggling...not a total parent win for us, but we are so proud of Ellie and how well she did.

We are really going to miss everyone at Meher. Its a good thing that she will have summer school starting on Monday. If today really was the last day I doubt Ellie would have done so well. She loves her teachers.