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.