 |
||
|
current I love reading, cuddling with Kim and Bailyn, working with computers, playing The Sims 2, and waiting anxiously for the release of Sims 3. 
|
2005-09-03 - 11:49 p.m. {snicker} This is Bailyn's list of sight words for this week. Kim and I got a good gutter chuckle when we saw them. You'd think the teacher would have listed them differently because of seriously immature parents like us! Last week's list was Jack, Jilly, can, play. In addition to working on this week's words with flash cards (which I brilliantly decided to use the computer for this, rather than the plain paper ones the teacher sends...more about that in a minute), we have to work on last weeks words with Hop 'N Pop. Why the name, I dunno, but Hop 'N Pop is a list of the previous week's 4 words repeatedly randomly on a page. The child's goal is to read all 45 words in less than 60 seconds. Seriously tough stuff for a 5-year-old, I think. I started out trying it with the timer set at 1 minute to see how far she could get, but she got very discouraged and upset when she "failed." We tried to explain that getting them all in less than a minute is EXTREMELY hard, and she's doing great, but she seems to think she's stupid if she doesn't get it on the first try. Seriously, she got upset enough to cry about it and was saying she wanted to get them all. It was pitiful. She was bummed after the first try, but she cried after the second "failure." Kim and I tried to explain that she was doing great....she only got 17 the first time, and the second time she made it to 26. Told her that she was getting better and we'd just keep practicing until she got it, and she was doing a great job. It is amazing how discouraged she got....the third and forth times, she was only half-heartedly trying....it was like, "I know I can't do this, so why bother?!" I stopped in the middle of the fourth time and told her that she needed to rest her brain, that it had been working very hard and was tired. She got upset AGAIN, and I sat her down and cuddled her and explained that I was NOT upset, that she worked very hard and I was proud of her. Her brain just needed to take a break from the hard work. What I didn't say was that Mommy needed to come up with a better method. I think I finally figured it out. I'm going to get a stopwatch and have her race against herself. "OK, you did it in 2 minutes, 32 seconds last time...let's see if we can beat that this time!!" That way will involve success more times than not, because she WILL get quicker the more she practices. Seems more constructive than repeated failures, but if any of you guys have any better suggestions, I'm all ears! I can't believe Kindergarten is this hard! It was just playtime when I was in school!! 0 comments so far
|