Smarty Pants

Yesterday I had my first visit at the regular OB's office. They did an ultrasound. Baby looks great - it is most definitely a thumb sucker. After that the tech asked me for a urine sample. You'll never guess what they did with it... A pregnancy test! It came back positive, thank GOD, because if it hadn't I would really be concerned about the THING growing in my belly.

I told Alice about this and she thought it was hilarious. Then she became very sober and said, "You know, Mom, maybe you should go to a different doctor. I don't think this one is very smart."

For what it's worth, I didn't actually see a doctor this time. It was an orientation appointment that normally takes place at 6 or 7 weeks. I will see the OB for the first time next week for my 12 week appointment. I will be 14 weeks....

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A few weeks ago Alice was lamenting that she was frustrated because she hadn't met her reading speed goal on a computer program at school. We asked her how many words per minute she was reading. 178. The goal was 212. This seemed crazy to us, so Tim looked up some statistics.

The average 2nd grader is reading 90 words per minute at the END of 2nd grade when tested on 2nd grade level material.

Average 5th graders read 130 words per minute at the end of 5th grade.

Adults read between 200 - 300 words per minute.

Alice was very excited to tell me that she met her speed goal today. She is now reading 214 words per minute on above level reading material.

Wow. Just wow.

Exhibit night!

Earlier this month, Alice's school had its first "Exhibit Night." The school is the arts magnet elementary school for the county (as well as housing the honors program). They do all sorts of neat things. There is an actual dance studio, multiple rooms for music, and art has a main classroom and second classroom with a kiln. At exhibit night, the whole school was transformed into an art gallery. It was really neat to see all the student work.


A student-made mural of ceramic tiles


2nd grade ceramics - Alice's is the yellow and brown cup in the center.

This map is in the hall near Alice's homeroom. It is HUGE!




Art by the other 2nd grade classes:


Alice's class did an extensive unit on Japan. They went to a museum to see Japanese artifacts, learned how to play "rock, paper, scissors" in Japanese, and had a visitor come talk to them about Japanese culture. All this was in addition to the more typical types of learning that go on in a classroom!
They learned how to write their names in Japanese:

They also each learned to write another word and created a picture around it. Alice's word was "school":


Next we went to see the instrumental music teacher. He is AMAZING. He had all kinds of instruments laid out all over the classroom for kids to play. Everything was very hands-on. His room was loud and chaotic in a good way. Everyone who walked into his room that night left having learned something new - myself included.

A piano Mr. Reynolds took apart so the kids can see how it works.


Demonstrating sound waves and vibration with a ping pong ball dancing on a speaker.

We also got to meet some of Alice's new friends.

Pretty Flowers

Today Alice disappeared outside with a notebook and a pencil. She was writing an essay - just because she wanted to. Here it is -

Lots of Pretty Flowers
by Alice

There are many flowers. Some of them are here for a porpes (purpose). Some of them mite be eating bugs, like the pitcher plant. Others mite be for scareing aminals. But my favrets are sunflowers, dazys, poppies, indian paint brush and the iris. What are your favrets? I would like to know! The flowers I listed I call show off flowers because they don't do much esept (except) look cool and look pretty and smell good. But theres a job that every flower does. The job is to polnat (pollinate). Now I know bees help with that, but it's importint. If it weren't for flowers and bees we would have to eat dirt and we would have to drink out of a sewer. But we would only be alive for a day. Then there would be no people liveing. Luckily theres food for us to eat.

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Not bad for a 2nd grader, huh?

School is still going well. We are all still very, very happy with the move. Mid-term report cards came home today - all E's (excellent). Alice was the most proud of the + she got for reading level. The reading level scale is -, = or + indicating below, at or above grade level.

Sponsored by....

I was so shocked by this I had to share it here: Scholastic InSchool Backing Off Its Corporate Ties.

No, I'm not shocked that Scholastic is backing off. I'm shocked they have ties with these industries in the first place! The coal industry?! Egg producers?! The Brita water filter people?! What are they doing in the classroom and WHO decided it was okay to let them in?!

I know. It's all about $$$$$$. Schools don't have any, industries do. Children have more consumer power these days than at any other time in history. Schools get something for free and possibly some $$, industry gets a captive audience with ZERO parent monitoring. Makes sense. Except that it is so very very WRONG...

I was probably exposed to marketing at school as a child. I don't remember it. It would have had to be in print ads because when I was in elementary school there were two or three TV's for the entire school and the computer lab consisted of two PC's in the library. When I was in school, an ad would be glanced at. Now? It is a constant bombardment.

Walking through Alice's (old) school the past two years, there were several times I noticed posters on the walls advertising movies that were coming out. Other ads would come home in her backpack. The kid who sells the most for the districts fall fundraiser wins a bazillion chicken nuggets from Chik-Fil-A. A different elementary school sells ad space on their fence to local businesses (The ads face the road, NOT the playground). I've always been annoyed by these things. I would rather schools be completely separate from corporate America. I do know that the $ isn't free flowing for education, especially in this state, so I figured it was a necessary evil. I am NOT okay with it, but I don't see our schools getting the $$ they need elsewhere, either.

But, advertising disguised as curriculum?! Whoa, now. That is a HUGE step over the line.

This summer is the first time we have allowed Alice to watch any TV other than the shows on PBS. We've branched out to a very few shows on Nickelodeon. Her screen time is still very much limited and it is rare that we are not either watching with her or in an adjoining room. Part of our afterschooling this summer has been to talk about advertisements and the different tactics companies use to make you want to buy things.

Alice has gotten quite good at seeing through ads. Which is a good thing, because school starts in a little over a week.

Afterschooling - March 31

We have been agonizing over what to do next year for school. (I know - this is a dramatic way to put things, but its true.) 2nd grade is 2nd grade. I know that. My biggest concern is that sitting in a classroom day after day without sufficient challenge will start to erode the love of learning that Alice currently has.

We looked into private schools. There was one that was a good fit, but it was too expensive. Homeschooling is a possibility, but no one's first choice. Alice is in the running for the magnet school honor's program lottery - but there aren't many seats available.

A few days ago I discovered that Tennessee treats "intellectually gifted" as a subgroup under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). (Tennessee is the only state that does this. Suddenly I like living here a whole lot more...) This means that we can request an IEP (individualized education plan) solely because Alice is gifted! This could be a game-changer for us. An IEP is legally binding - the school would be required to make accommodations. Alice has already been identified as "intellectually gifted" by the district's own test.

Tim and I are planning to meet with the school sometime soon.

Anyhow, finding that out has been so exciting to me, I had to share.

Here is what we're working on with afterschooling this month:

Science: Plants - what do plants need to grow? Sprouting seeds. (Lima beans in wet paper towels, etc.) Different parts of the flower. Bees and pollination.

This is Alice's request. They are sprouting lima beans at school. She wanted to do the same thing at home, but made her request while I was in the middle of cooking dinner. I told her she needed to wait, but she could draw out the experiment if she wanted to. She stormed off to her room. A few minutes later I heard her reading a book about plants to her dolls. This is another great thing about afterschooling - you can take the curriculum that is being covered in school and explore it much further.

We will also probably start something with elements and the periodic table. She keeps asking me questions about it and is not satisfied with, "I don't know. We'll have to look that up later."

Math: Hammering addition and subtraction facts (always), telling time, counting money. (also supplementing school) I have a kid's clock kit with gears that I've been holding back since summer. That will probably come out this month as a daddy-daughter project.

Language Arts: Synonyms and Antonyms (school supplementation), letter writing.

History / read aloud: Little House in the Big Woods

Afterschooling

Alice with skull (who is wearing my tiara!): one of our afterschooling tools and one of Alice's favorite Christmas gifts. Do you know where your Maxilla is? She does....

This year we have been "afterschooling."

This is a post I've sat down to write a bunch of times and every time I've gotten hung up. I don't want to be that parent who thinks (or is perceived to think) that their kid is the next Nobel Prize winner.

BUT - Alice is bright, and it has become an issue at school. Strange, because you always think the other way - if a child has a hard time learning it creates a problem at school. This was not on my radar.

Quite simply, she was bored and her boredom at school was translating into behavior problems at home.

I think the school is doing their best. Things have dramatically improved, even in the past month (hooray for the advanced reading group!), but we still don't feel she's getting everything she needs. And, honestly, I don't blame the school for that. There is a HUGE range of levels in her class from kids who can read anything to kids who can't read at all. The teachers have a responsibility to get everyone up to snuff by the end of the year.

So, this year we have been supplementing at home. We've always done this, but this year I took the leap to be organized about it and discovered along the way that this is called "afterschooling." Alice enjoys her "smart work" and (for now) does it happily. She asks to do math. Every few weeks we shake up our curriculum. Here is what we are working on now:

Math: hammering basic addition and subtraction facts, starting to teach the concept of regrouping. She's been working on multiplication and division on her own using manipulatives and with no pushing from me. I'm not ready to teach multiplication!

Writing: a story for our local PBS's story contest

Art: Expressionism unit / the art of Edvard Munch (who painted The Scream) and creating art inspired by Munch.

Science: clouds and the water cycle - her choice

Reading: whatever she happens to be reading - right now she's into the Ivy and Bean series, but she may have finished them.

We don't do everything every day. She does go to school, after all! I try to hit at least one or two subjects per day. Math is a must and it doesn't take much time for her to whip through a worksheet or two. She also reads every day and averages about 3 chapter books a week (500 pages?). Once we figured out that she could take a book to school to read when she finished her work instead of just sitting at her table, everyone's attitude toward school greatly improved.

Pleasant Purple

So, things are going well at Wondergirl's school. About a month ago she won the Good Citizen award for her class. It was a big deal and involved walking across the stage in front of the whole school to get a certificate, ribbon and pencil from the principal. Wondergirl's class operates on a color system for behavior. Every day the kids start out on "Pleasant Purple." Then, if they make bad choices, they move to Oops Orange, Yucky Yellow, and, finally, Ghastly Green. (It's not really ghastly green, it's some other "g" adjective that I can never remember. We call it ghastly green here.) When a child lands on Ghastly Green, their parents are called. Kids can also move up to Beautiful Blue if they do something exceptionally good.

Most of WG's class winds up in the orange to yellow range by the end of the day with several hitting the dreaded green. Her teacher has her hands full. The class is rowdy, and it is also her first.

WG is coming up on 50 consecutive days of being pleasantly purple. Tim and I think that's a pretty big deal, so I think she will be getting some sort of surprise reward when we visit Granny Julie and Friend John for Thanksgiving.

Kindergarten Update

I have been lax in my Wondergirl updates lately. School has started, the symphony season has started, and I've just been lazy. I apologise.

School is going well. WG adores her teacher. After a little bit of a rough start Tim and I like this teacher, too. The school as a whole we're luke-warm about. They just have some strange rules. If kids get there before the first bell in the morning they have to sit in lines in the gym. They aren't allowed to talk and they have to listen to classical music. Which isn't bad in itself, but they always have the slowest, saddest classical music playing. Maybe they are trying to depress them into docile behavior or bore them into submission. I like classical music (obviously) and even I wouldn't choose to listen to the stuff they play every morning.

They also have the 5th grade safety patrol directing traffic in the parking lot for Kindergarten pick-up. There is a reason why kids have to be 16 to get a drivers license. It's called judgement. It is my opinion that 5th graders do not have sufficient judgement to direct traffic in the parking lot, so I park across the street and walk to pick WG up. I did the car line once. It was enough.

But Wondergirl is getting along well. She has friends. She seems to like the work except for math. She doesn't like math because right now they are working on sorting things and they have to cross off pictures that don't match. She always likes the picture that is different the best and gets mad that she has to cross it out. Today she had to turn in homework that consisted of a big letter A filled with pictures of A words. The kids were supposed to cut pictures out of magazines. We only had seed catalogs. WG cut out all the pictures of flowers whose formal names started with A. Somehow I don't think this is what the teacher had in mind... The kids have to present their letters today, so the whole class will get a horticulture lesson.

Oma, Jamie and Ogie

WG has surrounded herself with a community of imaginary friends. I'm thinking this might be hereditary since I had quite the menagerie when I was little: boy-girl twins named Nogie and Eggroll, a dog named Ginger, and a whole flock of sheep. WG's imaginary friends are all people, sort of.

Oma was the first to make an appearance. Oma is devious. Most of the time she is mean to WG. She is seven feet tall (since I've never seen her this is a guess, but she is "taller than Uncle Neil" so 7 ft is probably about right.), has yellow eyes and wild hair that changes color daily. She lives in China, which happens to be around the corner from our house. Oma rides a scooter and, on our recent trip to Ohio, followed us the whole way. Oma has been put in jail for "making bad choices," speared with a sword (by our neighbor), and thrown out the car window (by me).

Jamie is another regular around our house. Jamie is a girl, but she is always referred to as "he" because, as WG puts it, "sometimes girls are boys." Yes, WG has a transgendered imaginary friend. Who also happens to share a name with my mother. Jamie is nice. We don't mind when Jamie comes to visit.

Ogie stops by once in awhile. Ogie is from elbowland.

Today was WG's first day of Kindergarten. I completely forgot to warn the teacher about Oma, Jamie and Ogie. It will be interesting to see if anyone went with her.

Parent teacher conference

It's been a long time.

WG is doing well. I went for my first parent-teacher conference a few weeks back. WG is at the top of her class academically and the bottom socially. That's about what we expected. WG is much more comfortable around adults than she is around her peers. It's the catch-22 of RSV lockdown: it keeps them well while they are small, but they lose out on social development. She'll catch up. She's not an outcast, she just doesn't exactly know how to play with her peers and is happy playing by herself.

Academically she's a knockout. On color identification they had her look at colored paper cutouts of bears. The gray bear was a bit faded and was kind of a bluish purplish gray. Miss Kim said she looked at it and said, "That bear is lavender." The faded red was magenta and pink was light pink. No lack of vocabulary here! She's tracking letters from left to right which is, apparently, pretty unusual for her age. She can count to 29 and turn over to 30, 40, 50, etc with prompts. Otherwise it's, "twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty-eleven, etc." Her scissor use is improving with the adaptive scissors. I actually kind of miss the worksheets that look like they've been attacked by someone with garden shears. They will work with her on transitioning to regular scissors by the end of the year. She's still writing backwards, but her teacher is chalking that up to her left handedness. WG does very well with the routines at school. Her teacher has no reservations about sending her on to Kindergarten next year. Her only recommendation is to keep up her socialization over the summer.

No pictures today, but if you pop over to my sewing blog you can see pics of my latest projects as well as a pic of WG in the coat that Tim made for her.

Reading

WG was looking at the bag of GF pretzels with a very concerned look on her face.
WG: "Why you gave me gluten pretzels?"
Me: "I didn't."
WG: "but it says gluten there" (pointing to the bag)
Me: "the next word is free, so it really says gluten-free."

I must say I think it's pretty funny that the first word WG read was gluten.

Giving thanks

I am thankful for all the "normal" things this Thanksgiving: family, enough food to eat, a roof over my head, my (and Tim's) job, etc.

I am thankful that the GF diet continues to help our entire family and that following it has become second nature.

I am thankful that WG qualified for at-risk preschool because it has made a tremendous difference. I am confident that she will do well in Kindergarten next year.

I am thankful for my wonderful husband who somehow has the skills to completely remodel our kitchen, plumbing, electric and all.

I am thankful for good friends who I can talk to about anything. When I was teaching in DeKalb, two of "my" moms were so close they were like sisters. I had always hoped for a friendship like that and it's nice to have one.

I am thankful for WG. My friend who is the mother of two preemies summed it up, she said she was thankful for her children and could never take them for granted because with the tiniest tip of the scale they might not have been here at all.

I am thankful for the things that make me laugh so hard it feels like I've done an hour's worth of sit ups.

I am thankful that my grandmother had such a nice ending to her life. That doesn't sound right, but you know what I mean.

I am thankful for caffiene. And the occasional glass of wine.

Letter of the week

Preschool is going well. WG now enters the building of her own free will and today, for the first time, she did not have a meltdown when I picked her up. She has friends and seems to be settling into the routine. Her main beef is that they make her use the bathroom. WG has a tremendous bladder capacity which combined with her tremendous pain tollerance makes pottying an annoyance. If she had it her way she would use the bathroom once a week or so.

She has homework. Granted, it's preschool, so it's not hard homework. Last Friday she had to wear something green because green is the school's color. (Their mascot is the dragon.) Today she came home with her sheet about what they were learning this week as well as homework. They are learning all about the letter R this week. Her assignment for tomorrow is to bring something that starts with the letter R for Millie the Letter Muncher to eat.

I have never met Millie, I'm thinking they want WG to bring a picture of something that starts with R. A picture of a rainbow is much easier to send than the real thing. WG spent dinner going through a laundry list of words. "ruh-ruh-refridgerator. Does refridgerator start with R? Ruh-ruh-pisghetti. Does pisghetti start with R? HAHAHAHA!!!" She gets it.

We forgot to find pictures so I was looking for some to cut out for her to choose from in the morning. I found an old Rachel Ray magazine. I cut her out. She is a double R, which in my opinion should mean extra credit. And besides, don't you just want to feed Rachel Ray to Millie the letter muncher? I think I might send her along anyway even if WG chooses the Roadkill Racoon.

The pre-K adventure begins

WG started pre-K Tuesday. So far it's going okay. She never wants to go in the morning and, with the exception of her first day, I have had to pry her out of the car and carry her into the building but once she is physically in the building she willingly goes and sits with the other kids in her class. Her teachers say she does well during the day. Yesterday she went on her first field trip. They tromped the kids up the street, caught the trolley and went downtown to hear the governor read stories.

In other news, Knoxville apparently had the distinction of having the highest gas prices in the country this past week. Lucky us. No investigations into price gouging yet but we'll see what develops.

The 5 minute pity party

Welcome to Holland by Emily Kingsley

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

Months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

I first read this shortly after WG was born. I looked it up tonight because I am throwing myself a 5 minute pity party. I'm sad that we are still in Holland. I thought for sure we would have hopped a plane to Italy by now. I'm very excited about pre-school and I think it will be an amazing thing for WG. I'm happy she qualified, but at the same time, I WISH she hadn't. When we were first married and Tim was working at the school, we never dreamed we would have a child enrolled there. No one does, I guess. I think the reason I'm needing my 5 minute pity party is because when I explain the pre-K situation to people, no one expresses disbelief that WG qualified. It's a really stupid thing to be wallowing over: we are very confident that this is the right place for her... I guess it's along the lines of a woman complaining about a dress making her look fat and then getting mad when her husband agrees. Silly? Very. Which is why my pity party was limited to 5 minutes only.

It's not a tragedy. Life goes on, we adjust and adapt. I really like tulips, anyway.

Pre-K

At her four year well check, WG's pediatrician strongly suggested that WG needed to be in some sort of a pre-K program. WG has some developmental hitches that we just aren't sure about. Dr. S. thought it would be a good idea to throw her into an unfamiliar environment to see if it made a difference, good or bad. There were a few problems we were having with finding a suitable program. Cost was one. Private pre-K was out of the question. A Mother's Day Out program would have been doable, but I was having a hard time justifying the cost for the educational value. It seemed to me that the money would be better spent on a dance or art class. Another problem is that we live in the Bible belt and the majority of pre-K educational programs are religiously based, whether they advertise themselves to be or not. This is fine, however, I think it is my job as WG's parent to guide her spiritual development. Different people and churches believe different things and we were not comfortable sending her to a program where we did not know exactly what those beliefs were.

After a particularly difficult day with a lot of tears (her's and mine), Tim made a phone call to a teacher he used to work with when we first got married to get her opinion on what to do next. Our county has a special needs public preschool program that has added a few "regular" classes for children who are at-risk. At risk is defined in many ways: ESL, low income, odd family situation, etc. WG was deemed to be at risk for what she has been through in the past as well as the difficulties we are having now. She will be in a regular classroom with a teacher who also has special ed credentials. She will be assessed for needs as far as PT, OT, and speech therapy are concerned and will be given services through the school if they think she needs them.

She will start on Tuesday. We went and met her teacher and TA today and got the registraton packet. They were both very nice. WG originally was not thrilled at the prospect of going to school but decided it would be okay since they have scissors and glue sticks there.