First Day of School 2019

Our sweet Peanut had her first day of 4 años -- her second year of school at the elementary school.  This is sort of like preschool but also more like her second year of Kindergarten (Spain has three years of traditional school before kids hit 1st grade) -- there isn't really an American equivalent :)

Every year kids change physical classrooms, but for the infantil kiddos (so grades three, four and five años) they stay with the same kids and same teacher.  Serafina's teacher last year was a substitute for the whole school year which I didn't quite understand at the time.  It gets confusing but from what I can understand, teachers are hired by the province government and then can teach in any of the cities/schools within that province.  Some teachers get fixed positions and stay at the same school, while others get substitute positions (often times these are permanent sub position so the teacher moves to various schools as needed).  Long story to explain that Serafina got a new teacher this year which is actually pretty rare for her age/grade, but all the kids stayed the same.  Serafina seemed to really like her new teacher (Seño Inma) and from what I saw, she seems great!

Either way -- it will be another amazing year and it is so nice having some idea of what is going on this year (from my stand point)!  And also nice that we don't have staggered start for this first week -- today was 2 hours for the whole school, then full days start tomorrow!

And just for fun, more facts about Spanish schools -- for the first time in forever, our school will mix up kids in the older elementary grades every two years.  It used to be that kids stayed with the same kids/class for their entire time in elementary school, but the teachers did change in the older grades.  This is very normal and what schools did for years (I have no idea if this new change was our school only or city-wide or province-wide).  There was a HUGE uproar over the classes changing kids every two years.  I just had to giggle since in the states, most kids change teachers and kiddos every single year!