School's In

After much thought and research we chose to send our kids to Jeddah Prep and Grammar School. It is a British/Dutch school that was established in Jeddah in 1967. It has received recognition as being the best international school. The curriculum is challenging and the rules a little stiff, but it has proved to be the best option for our kids. The British educational system begins schooling at age four, making what we call kindergarten Year 1. So Erin is in Year 2, Ethan is in Year 4, and Kennedy is in Year 7. Ethan and Erin attend the Prep school and Kennedy attends the Grammar school, both of which are on the same campus.

The school divides their students into houses with each house competing against each other all year to earn points. At the end of the year the points are tallied and the house with the most points wins the coveted House Cup…sound a little Harry Potter-ish? Apparently this is common in the British school system. The kids take their house points very seriously. They earn them for outstanding work, behavior, and overall excellence. They are also earned at in-school activities such as field day and interhouse sporting and intellectual competitions. Fortunately the school was wise enough to put children from the same family in the same house, thus dispelling any rivalries at home. Our children are in the Farasan House with the shirt color of blue. Farasan is a group of islands in the Red Sea off southern Saudi.

The children are adapting to the British way of spelling and picking up some more-British used expressions. Ethan is the only one, though, who has picked up any change in his dialect. It has been funny to watch them with their spelling of words such as ‘favour’ or ‘centimetre’ and not correct them. Their math problems dealing with money are also in pounds and pence. I realized the other day that Erin was not quite solidly grounded in the U.S. money system and has forgotten what a nickel and dime are and their value. Oops. Guess we need to be working on that at home. Kennedy is becoming quite knowledgeable in English history. She’s not very pleased, though, that the school does not recognize the Fourth of July and they still have to go to school. Dano and I asked her why they would want to celebrate our independence from them!!

A bonus of the school is that they offer after-school activities. The bus even brings them home when they stay. The older years are allowed to participate in more activities than the younger ones. Erin is taking ballet. Ethan is involved in prep choir, basketball, and cricket. Kennedy participates in a current events/cultural discussion group, girls taebo, choir, and horseback riding. The horse riding is given at an off-site location. They spend half the time receiving riding instruction and the other half helping disabled kids ride horses. Kennedy loves this as she has wanted to ride horses for quite some time (must be in her blood) and she loves helping children. The activities change each term. The school is on a trimester schedule with three terms each being twelve weeks long. School is in session from mid-September through the beginning of July. They rarely have any days off for…well, anything. We certainly don’t have snow days here! They do receive three or so days off at mid-term and at the end of each term is a two-four week break… usually a long one for Christmas and two weeks around spring break time.

Erin’s teacher is from South Africa and has been warmly aware of Erin and her transition. Of the three children, she has had to stretch herself the most. Her weekly spelling words have included words like window, because, thought, brought, suddenly, and thirsty. In addition she has weekly dictation that includes sentences such as ‘The silver monster hid under the rock during the night.’ This was quite surprising for us as it’s a little beyond what we’re used to in first grade. The first two weeks were a struggle for her, but she works very hard to study her words everyday and has earned silver and gold stars on her tests. The third week she brought home dictation sentences, there was an addendum to learn 2X tables and 5X tables. I have to say I was a little astounded and worried. She knew how to count by twos and by fives so now I just had the task of explaining what multiplication is and how 2x8 is 16. Again, after a long, stressful week she could manage through both times tables and did quite well on the assessment. Then they were skip-counting by 3s. She had been doing this at her school in Ohio so she was familiar with it. Then I again explained how skip-counting leads to multiplication. The following week she was to learn her 3X tables. When I asked her one night how math was going at school she replied that it was fine, that she hadn’t finished the workbook problems but her teacher let her go out to break anyway. I asked how many she had not completed and she told me she had finished 3 of the 6 pages. (Surprised again.) I asked her if it was multiplication problems. No, it was subtracting double-digit problems and she had gotten stuck on 80-53. What? From what we’re used to that seems so much more like second grade work. I asked her if everyone else had finished and she replied they had. While I was thinking about needing to work extra on double-digit subtraction and learning to borrow, she sighed and told me, “But everyone else is faster because they use their abacus.” (However, she pronounced it like her teacher…abbycus.) Hello? How come it had not been mentioned before? I asked her if she knew what an abacus was and how to use it. Yep. She knew. I didn’t know anyone still used abacuses to do math. We proceeded to locate an abacus and will be interested to see how she uses it. After talking with other parents I have found out that many children who move in at this age have many, many nights of tears and frustration…sometimes for a year or two and then everything clicks and they’re right with everyone else. Hopefully this will prove to be a strength of Erin. If nothing else, she is learning to work hard and see the fruits of her labor. We are so proud of her determination and good work.

Ethan has enjoyed his class even though his teacher “is fierce.” (I think that means very strict.) She has told us on a few occasions how much she also enjoys him and his endless enthusiasm. He continues to excel at spelling and has been the star pupil in math several times. As a prolific writer he is loving all the writing opportunities he is having. His most recent assignment was creating a strange planet. Dano and I continue to be amazed at his creative mind and fantastic writing abilities. His writing structure is like nothing we produced in third grade. He still loves to read and has recently become hooked on reading classics such as Treasure Island, White Fang, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Wind in the Willows, and Around the World in Eighty Days. He reads like Kennedy, totally absorbed and unaware of anything else. It’s been fun to watch him read some of the same books Kennedy read and hear them discuss them. It’s like their own mini book club! He is thoroughly enjoying Arabic and picks up on the language quickly. The kids can all greet someone, ask them how they are doing, tell them their name, and say goodbye. Ethan has been very quick to pick up on some Saudi history and shares it with us frequently, such as why there is so much green in everything and what the symbols in the Saudi flag represent. Ethan was very pleased to pass off one of his scouting electives (though we’ve amped it up a little) of counting to ten in five languages. We haven’t yet found a scout troop (I know there’s one here) so Ethan and I do scouts together one night a week. (Knowing this might be the case, I purchased the scout leader info before we left.) Ethan loves learning and seeing his progress and successes. He continues to be super competitive, but thankfully he is most competitive with himself.

Kennedy is undoubtedly the busiest. She has a total of ten classes! A couple of weekends ago she had homework in nine of them! She loves each class and has never complained about the homework load. Her classes include ICT (informational computer technology), English, History, Arabic, French, Art, LCT (local cultural training), Maths (this is not a typo-it is how they refer to the American class of Math), Science, and Geography. She has produced many exceptional projects which have received recognition from her teachers and even department heads. I’m just hoping at this rate she doesn’t hit burnout before college! Again though, she thrives on producing wonderful work and learning is enjoyable to her. She has amazed her teachers with her Power Point presentations and ability to create incredible charts and graphs on the computer. I’m amazed. She gets it from Dano. The first week of school I was in her room looking for Abigail’s puppy and came across her science notebook. As it had been a whirlwind week and we had not talked much about each class, I opened it to see what she was doing. In science they were discussing health and she had notes and paste-ins about the reproductive system. What?!! I thought that may not come until seventh or eighth grade! We haven’t even had the “truth about Christmas” talk (not for lack of trying – Kennedy is just a believer in all that’s good. I’m not sure if she refuses to believe anything else or is just sparing our feelings by letting us know she’s onto us!) As I showed it to Dano, he was just as surprised. We wondered if we would win the awful parent award if we had a special dinner out with Kennedy and had the “Santa” talk and the birds and the bees talk at the same time!! It didn’t help that a few days later when the kids were telling us some more school supplies they needed, Ethan listed off “pencils, a ruler, pencil sharpener, and a rubber.” What!!! Sixth grade I could understand, but what exactly are they covering in third grade?!! Trying not to let him on to our unbelief in what we were hearing, we just asked him again, “A what?” “You know, a rubber. It’s the same as an eraser.” Oh, thank goodness. I still do a double-take when I hear my children say, “I lost my rubber.” or “Someone took my rubber.” I didn’t understand why (on earth)they called it this until Erin was working one day, made a mistake and told me she needed to rub it out. Oh, well, that does make sense, I guess. It still doesn’t sound right and I have often imagined what will happen when we return to the states in a couple of years and they innocently ask their teacher for a rubber or ask their friend to borrow a rubber. Or, when Ethan talks about wearing a jumper (what they call a sweatshirt). Again, we were caught off guard when we were taking a walk and Ethan told us he’d lost his jumper. Dano doesn’t care for this one either as it just doesn’t sound masculine at all.

Overall, we are very pleased with and grateful for the education they are receiving here. I am appreciating the challenges they are receiving, and seeing them face them and tackle them brings me great joy.