School Days

From NaBloPoMo:  If you could return to any grade in school, which one would you want to do again?

I think it is funny that most prompts for journals and blogs ask you to remember things about your past and often ask about things you want to relive or they ask you to imagine the future or they ask you to talk to yourself in 10 years...I don't really do any of those things, for the most part.
 
HOWEVER 

Since I have been using the prompts to help me stay on track with writing something regularly, I decided to play along with this one.  At first, I thought maybe I would want to relive something from high school, but after some thought, there is one grade that always comes up for me when I think about school - Grade 2.

Jean in Grade 2. Sorry for holes.

Second grade was when I lived in Crestview Housing in Wiesbaden, Germany. The elementary school for that military housing development was unique. Obviously, I don't know the whys and wherefores of it - I was 8 years old. Grades 1-3 (maybe kindergarten but I never saw those kids) were held in classrooms that were converted from old maid's quarters located in the stairwells of the base housing.  I think there were 3-4 buildings where the classes were held. I didn't start there until second grade.  My teacher was Ms. Ballantine.  She was from Vermont and she talked about skiing sometimes. I didn't really know much about skiing.  (Sometime that year, I saw a movie called "The Other Side of the Mountain" about a famous skiier who was paralyzed in a skiing accident - little bit traumatic for me...).  I think she was engaged. She had beautiful red hair and one of her hands was not functional. I loved her. I did all I could to please her. Our room had a foyer (I had never heard of that until then) and a coat room. We hung our coats and left our lunches in the coat room and moved into the classroom.  We sang patriotic songs every morning before classes started. She read "Charlotte's Web" other classic books to us.

Second grade was one of my favorite years.