Week in Review

I can't believe I didn't blog for the whole week! Sorry, I've been busy, totally stressed, and sick :|

This week her sight words were, again, the color words. She's pretty well mastered them all.

Her poem changed from one apple poem to a different apple poem, which messed her up because she kept intertwining the 2 poems. Her teacher had posted the one poem on the Moodle page, and she had it memorized totally over the weekend, then Monday rolled around and the teacher had changed the poem. Kind of sneaky, and Terra never quite learned the new one 100%.

ORIGINAL POEM:
Apple Tree

Way up high in an apple tree
two red apples winked at me.
So I shook that tree as hard as I could
And down came the apples
Mmm- they were good!

NEW POEM:
Apples
Apples, apples what a treat
Sweet and tart and good to eat
Apples green and apples red
hang from branches overhead
and when they ripen,
down they drop
so we can taste our apple crop!

The even more confusing news is that, barring any more changes, next week's poem is also about apples. We're looking forward to more confusion lol.

This week was an all-green-smilies week, of which we are very proud. I'm not sure what her reward will be this week - Daddy has to work (thank you Universe for the opportunity to work, after 9 months of being unemployed!) so whatever it will have to be on Sunday.

There are new pictures up on the Shutterfly site too. Here are a couple of her, with any other children cropped out.

She brought home her first book from the Media Center: "How About a Hug" which doesn't seem to hold her attention, or be all that helpful in learning any of the things they're working on. We went to the local library too, and checked out some more books, books that incorporate her color words, the days of the week, the seasons, etc...

She has not yet learned to write her full name quite well enough to fi it on the line to get her own library card though.

Friday 9/18

Green smiley again today. That's 4 for the week. Normally the rule is that if she gets a green every day for the week, she is rewarded with a Saturday outing. She got one yellow this week, so she *shouldn't* be getting any outing this week. Unfortunately (for the strict parent in me) the Cabarrus County Fair is in town, and someone has offered to pay 1/2 the cost of getting in for the whole family. That means, of course, that she's getting an unearned outing. But ya know, our county doesn't have a fair any more, it's a once a year opportunity, and it isn't really fair to to the other kids to be disallowed based on Terra's classroom behavior. *sigh* Sometimes, I think life with one child must be so much less complicated!

She knows nearly all of her color words on sight, but still confuses blue and brown. I figure 8 out of 10 isn't too bad, considering she only had to memorize 3 words last week!

Our First Yellow Smiley

Well I guess I jinxed her with my post yesterday. Today she got her first yellow smiley - big surprise, she got it for talking when she was supposed to be NOT talking. I'm a little surprised that hasn't been an issue before, she does love to talk.

So she got off the bus and came across the yard, and she whispered in my ear, "Mommy, please don'tbe mad, I accidentally got a yellow smiley..." and started crying. Poor kid, she was more upset than I was about it. I mean, don't get me wrong, disobeying the teacher (who had warned her several times) is unacceptable - but she was so sorry, I feel like it made a deep enough impression on her that she didn't need me to yell at her. We talked about it, and she knows it wasn't ok. If it becomes a habit, I'll be harsher, but today, I was just glad to see that she took it seriously and understood that yellow smilies are not ok. And, a little bit of me is glad that her first yellow wasn't for shoving someone down on the playground, ya know?

So she's really getting the color words down pretty well, but I think we'll have to keep working on them for a while. She has trouble with black and gray especially. She did decide we were ALL playing school this evening though and sang the days of the week, and the cutest darn weather song ever! And boy was she a strict teacher! She made me sit criss cross apple sauce on the carpet for a long time, and when I straightened out my legs, she threatened me with a BLUE smiley, which is as bad as it gets. Whew, she's tough!

We're working pretty heavily on getting her to write her last name, and to control the size of her printing, in hopes that she will soon be able to write her name well enough on the application at the library, and get her very own library card. We'll see how long that takes, she really has a hard time controling the size of her letters so, we'll see.

Mommy has a Migraine

This morning at 5am, Terra's big brother Tyler, her daddy's oldest son, arrived from NY. He'll be living with us, and I can't tell you how excited we all are! He arrived before Terra left for school, but she's like me, not all that coherent in the early morning hours, so when she got off the bus, she asked Scott, "Was I daydreaming about Tyler being here?"

Of course, Scott couldn't pass up the opportunity to tease her and said yes. She was heart broken! Thank goodness he told her the truth quickly, or she'd have gone into full meltdown mode, and that doesn't happen often with Terra.

Labor Day Night

Well, the three day weekend was fun, except for Terra asking, "Do I have school tomorrow!?" every day! We went to the park on Saturday to reward her for all the green smilies. Man was it hot! Then we went to IHOP for dinner, where, in case you didn't know it, for the month of September, kids 12 and under eat free!

We worked a bit on her new poem "Rainbow Hair." too. It's a little longer and harder to memorize, and I assume it will require a bit more work to be able to get it down pat.

Rainbow Hair

Rainbow purple
Rainbow blue
Rainbow green and yellow too
Rainbow orange
Rainbow red
Rainbow colors on my head
Colors, colors, everywhere!
I like rainbows in my hair.

It's so cute when she repeats it with me though! We've created a Learning Wall - totally low-tech, with all of her (color coded) color words, and her number words, her poems, a clock, a calendar, etc... as she does this poem, she points at the color words. She came up with that idea, but it's really helping her with the memorization, as well as sneaking in some familiarity with her color words :)