Congratulations Miss Mullins!!!

I haven't posted in over a year. That's so sad. SO much has happened since then! And one of those things is that Miss Mullins won Teacher of the Year!!! Congrats Miss Mullins!

Shoot, so Terra's in 1st grade now, with Mrs. Sebero. The rest of Kindy was a breeze, mostly. Had anissue (caused by a combination of Terra's sensitive personality and a not-all-that-sensitive Teacher Assistant. Actually - she HATED school the entire second half of Kindy. She cried almost every evening, begged me not to make her go back the next day, and cried just about every morning t the bus stop.

Despite that, she flourished academically. She's such a smart kid, and I still struggle with the dilemma of letting her run free to meet her own abilities, and tempering that in order to keep her from getting too far ahead and becoming bored and troublesome.

Anyway, she blew Kindy out of the water, played away her summer, and started 1st grade with a new teacher - Mrs. Sebero. We've gotten her 1st (exemplary) report card, had her first conference (full ofrave reviews from the new teacher)  and she even won a Terrific Kid Award last month.

Today, she's on her way to the Pumpkin Patch again. She isn't as excited this year - wanted her father and I to go with her!

So she's currently reading on a level 14, and is pretty much insatiable when it comes to books. She's following in the Family Tradition of being less 'fluent' in Math. She just doesn't love it, but she works hard and does well despite the family curse.

She also has a new best friend. A little girl named Sheila who moved in 3 doors down. They're exactly alike - perpetually messy haired, hyper, happy, and in charge of the Universe. There are, of course, clashes, when they disagree, since they're both such tiny forces of nature - but if the child's mother would back off and let them sort things out, they'd be fine. Unfortunately, she, almost daily, tells them they can't play together anymore because they fight too much. Of course, Sheila is so... um... what's the word? Strong-willed! She's so strong willed that, before the day is over, she's convinced her mom to change her mind,and we wash, rinse, and repeat, ad nauseum.

Anyway, the little darling left a path of destruction in her wake when she left this morning, so I'm going to go dig the house from beneath the rubble left behind by the whirlwind that is my beautiful, brilliant and amazing baby girl - have a  beautiful day! 

Thursday & Friday (11/6 & 11/7)

Yesterday (Thursday) Terra came home with a math workbook to use at home to practice her math. We're having to limit how many pages she does each night. I feel badly, I shouldn't be limiting her. I feel like she should be able to learn at HER pace, in step with her level of motivation, curiosity, and energy. And yet I know that Public School doesn't work that way, and fear letting her get too far ahead of the rest of the class's level. I am encouraging her to be mediocre? I don't want her to be average if she can (and she can, it's obvious) be so much more than average. Even the high end of average sucks, if she could has the ability to excel beyond that. I'm not sure what to do, how to handle this.  I do NOT want to hold her back in any way.

And yet, I can't let her get too far ahead because she'll then be bored and unchallenged, which I know from experience leads to trouble. I know I am not equipped to home school her, tried that last year. She craves the social interaction she gets at school, she loves the group activities, and having other kids to work with is such a huge plus...

You'd think I'd know by now that parenting is complicated, but I'm at a total loss here.

Wednesday Nov 4

Today we got to RSVP to her first official classmate birthday party. Fun! It's for a boy in her class who loves Transformers. Can't really afford to buy someone elses kid a gift, but we will anyway. We haven't lived up to our end of the "5 green smilies = a Saturday special outing" deal lately. I'll just find a good deal on something Transformers...

She of course got a green smiley today, or we wouldn't even have considered RSVPing that we'd be there lol.

Apparently they tested the class on their sight words today, Terra knew 28 of 32 on sight. The ones she didn't know surprised me. She already knows this week's words, but not my, do, the, and like.  She needs to be practicing her sight words daily, but with me working six nights a week, it isn't really happening. That makes me sad - I don't (really really don't) want my job to have a negative influence on her school performance!

Monday and Tuesday

Monday and Tuesday - the first of each in November. A new week means new sight words, and a new poem:

November

In November's gusty gale
I will flop my flippy tale
and spout hot soup - I'll be a whale.
Spouting once
spouting twice
spouting chicken soup with rice.

Awesome, more chicken soup... maybe it'll help with all the sickies! 

Her new sight words are: fun, play, & my.

As of now, 1:34am Wednesday morning, we haven't even made new flash cards for them. I've GOT to get my stuff together with this whole working thing. I feel so out of touch all of a sudden!

Another thing that arrived in her spiffy pink backpack today - confirmation that I have been approved to volunteer at the school! Woo Hoo! Now, the trick will be to figure out how I'm going to manage to actually volunteer when I already can't manage this working thing!

Terra also got to attend her previously rained out field trip to Riverbend Farms. That's the local pumpkin patch, petting zoo, etc. The teachers took nearly 100 pics! I'm only sharing a couple though because most of them are group shots and I try not to take the liberty of posting pictures of other people's children on the internet. However, from the ones I'm posting, you'll see that they magically taught her to feed the animals, plow, and DRIVE! Man, and I can't get her to clean her own room!

Absence # 3

Absent again. They say going to public school strengthens a child's immune system because they're exposed to multitudes of illnesses that their little bodies build up an immunity to. I'm looking forward to the "strengthening" part. So far, all we've had is the 'sick' part.

Absence #2

I swear Terra hasn't been totally well since she started school - she's had this cough she just can't quite get rid of. She hasn't run a fever since the night before her first absence, but she hasn't been well either. The last couple of days she's had a head cold. Last night it moved into her eyes, which are now swollen and gunky - and the cough is back, again. We kept her home today. She was less than thrilled to hear that she wasn't going to school this morning. Now she's having fun using Daddy's computer to play silly games, and I'm off to work. Hope she feels better tomorrow!

Pumpkin Activities

Here are some photos from their pumpkin activities the other day. They estimatedthe weights of4 different pumpkins of various sizes, predicted whether they would sink or float, and then got to all take turns ripping the guts out of the largest of the pumpkins. I really wish I could share more pics, but I won't share pics with other people's children in them...

is it just me or does she look a lil Punkin Drunk in this pic?

Forgive/overlook the terribly chapped upper lip that she won't stop licking!

In this pic she's recording her findings and making a little book out of the things she learned. So cute to see pictures of her writing like this, seems so grown up.

Had to blur a kid or two out of this pic :)