Kindergarten Orientation

Little Man and I went to the Open House at his school this morning.  This is what I learned.

1.  Always bring the years school supplies with you to open house so that you don't have to force your child to carry all of it with you on their first day of school.  (This is especially helpful when the school supply list includes 2 boxes of tissues)
2.  The "meet the administration" period is actually the "force a lot of people into the gym to stand around in the heat and noise for 30 minutes" time.  In the future, skip this and go straight to the classrooms.
3.  If you have a ton of questions you hope to get answered before school starts, write them down otherwise you will forget all of them and leave without any of the information you were hoping to gain.
4.  Buying school lunch isn't what it used to be, apparently I can pay online and they have more than one option and it all seems rather confusing.  We will pack lunch.
5. Snack is a communal effort (I am not happy) where each family donates a box of cracker/pretzels (insert some other processed food crap here) every other month and the teacher uses that for snack time each day.  So the whole class eats the same snack of crap processed food. 
6.  There is a Tuesday folder where I will hopefully get more information as the year goes on but apparently it is the dreaded folder because of the annoyance of having to go through it.
7.  Homework - we may or may not have homework this year.  His teacher is new to the school so it isn't clear if she is assigning homework yet. 
8.  There are 18 children in his class and 2 teachers.  Ms. J and Ms. H (the assistant teacher).  I am really happy about this ratio of kids to teachers. 

Little Man didn't enjoy the "really loud part" of the morning but enjoyed meeting his teacher and seeing his classroom.  He met a few friends including the little girl who will be sitting next to him.  He says his favorite thing was the book area because there were a lot of books there that he had never read before.  He spent a good 10 minutes reading books there by himself while I filled out forms and talked to his teacher.  He proudly gave his teacher the picture he drew for her this morning.  It is a picture of him fishing off of a pier.  She made it into the picture too even though he hadn't met her yet.  It was sweet to hear him explaining the picture to her and all of the details he included in his explanation.

I have a headache and am overwhelmed by the lack of information rather than the wealth of information.  I am glad that I only have to go into this blind once.