#first grade

Mrs. Ragland's 1st Grade Class- Willow Creek Elementary School

clockwise from top to bottom: Jeremiah Kahananui, Kiara Kapoor, Zoey Acheampong, Raiden Sailsbury, Myles Hansen, Viviana Tashimo, Everleigh Burke, Dallas Ellsworth, Catherine Kamara, Blaine Estevez-Dohert, Andre Jackson, and Akiko Sato-Smith

Teacher: Mrs. Juliette Ragland

Some of you may remember when I introduced you to Juliette Ragland, a first-grade teacher and a mother of four kids, all under the age of 8 years old. Well, since I've already shown you her out of school family, why not introduce you to the kids she has the privilege to call her students?

Life in first grade is far from perfect. There are days where the kids misbehave, days where Juliette gets a bit more snappy than she should be with them, days with fire drills, lockdown drills, colds and flus going around, all of which make Juliette question why she became a teacher in the first place.

And then, she remembers.

The elation in Viviana's eyes when she learned how to tie her shoes for the first time. Raidan pronouncing Ankylosaurus without slipping up and being so proud of himself. Andre's shy smile when he's identified for his musical talents and not just for being Cairo's son.

She remembers the brain breaks they have, dancing to the kids radio to get their wiggles out. The movie days, field trips, Teacher Appreciation Week cards. These small moments are what make teaching worth it for Mrs. Ragland. The way she manages to add whimsy into even the tiniest of details is why so many six and seven year olds long to have her as their first entrance into elementary school.

And for these twelve child Sims, they got their wish.

Approaching Halloween that school year, I was going to go trick-or-treating in the neighborhood of my godsiblings

Since I was really into Transformers at the time because of re-runs of the OG series on The Hub, I wanted to be Optimus Prime, and I thought it would cool if my godbrother was Bumblebee. Come that Halloween, my godbrother actually dressed up as Bumblebee

There was a chance my mom overheard me saying that and suggested to my godmother the idea to validate me, but the next incident was purely psychic

During a class in the first grade, our teacher was playing an eye spy game where two of us would use the pointing sticks to point to the country on the map she spied

Moments before picking one of the hundreds of countries on the map, I zeroed in on the country Jordan, likely because my brother's name was Jordan, and thought it would be cool if my teacher chose Jordan

Right after preemptively focusing on Jordan, I hear my teacher say "I spy with my little eye, Jordan."

Imagine every 6-to-7-year-old's shock when I instantly point to Jordan, a Middle East country people rarely talk about (no offense to any Jordanians who may see this), as if I were a geography wiz

JumpStart 1st Grade (1995)