School - Off to a good start

So we are heading towards the end of the second week of school for Alice. She is doing great. She walks to and from her bus stop on her own.  I was allowed to go the first 2 days of school :)

She has a 4 core courses, plus 4 "encore" classes, 3 of which she attends on a rotating schedule (A/B/C days). She also spends some time (not much) with her ESOL teacher on B days. Alice comes home from school each day in a good mood, although this a child I have yet to see in a bad mood.

The reports we've had so far have been very good. For example from her social studies teacher:

Alice is an awesome young girl- she volunteers to read and share answers, she is always on task and eager to learn - she is truly a role model in our class.  Several classmates have taken to helping Alice with tasks and clarification, the students are very kind and I hope Alice has had a positive experience so far in middle school.

And from her math teacher:

Alice is participating and clearly enjoys math (and obviously is quite good at it).  ...  Alice is clearly a bright girl and I don't want her to feel bored in my class but their are options for her to be more challenged.  

But everything isn't perfect. As the math teacher mentioned, Alice is not feeling challenged in her current math placement. We are looking at moving her into a more advanced math class, but there's still the problem of her language/vocabulary lagging her computational ability. UPDATE:  We did move her and she is much happier, but still says it's easy. Don't think I like what that says about how US schools are doing teaching math these days. 

We are finalizing her IEP next week which will address primarily issues with her speech. The need for this is apparent in this observation from her speech & language pathologist:

Science class went pretty well.  ...  She managed to follow some fairly linguistically complex directions as long as she had them verbally + in text in front of her.  She asked questions (of all four adults in the room) when she did not understand or she looked to see what other students were doing and then followed.

For routine phrases (“I don’t know.”, “What is this?” “I don’t understand”) she was very understandable.  But when she had to ask a novel question about content, she was less than 50% intelligible.

The school has been very easy to work with and accommodating. I hope things continue to only get better for Alice and that we can build on these experiences and relationships to get Lucy off to a great start too.