New Year, New Girl, New Milestones

It has been a LONG while since I did anything with this blog but I promise I will do better :-)

So this year we had hoped that Ash would start in the International School with an aide provided by us. Not a teacher but basically someone who speaks good English to help her out in the classroom. Circumstances came up and we no longer have the aide. It worked out better for her since I cold not offer her full time work and she has found full time work. 

I am back to homeschooling Ash and so far it is going great. We have our hurdles, fallouts, meltdowns, and epic catastrophic moments but it is working. 

This year I am much more structured with her. Afterall, she is in Kindergarten now!!!! WOW!!!! I just got done blogging about my son starting Pre-K but man.... KINDERGARTEN!!!!! ALMOST 6!!!! Good lord!!!!

My beautiful and fearless Kindergartner!!!

The first two days I spent Pre-testing her through Unique Learning System to see what differentiation she needs to be on and what her skills are at this point. She was given a Pre-test over the September unit "All About School". The test covered math skills, general knowledge, litracy, and content reading. Reading she did VERY poor in, but I knew that was a weak spot for her. The others were 50% correct. Which on a pretest 50% is good. That means there is room to develop. At the end of September she will take the post test which is the same exact test. 

I also developed assessments for her on basic skills she would have acquired in Pre-K. She is a SPED student so I knew that some of the content was not mastered yet. She has a diagnosed language disorder so we work around it in the form of making the lessons more in the form of speech therapy. 

We are started using a program called Reading Eggs and she LOVES it!!!!! I know this is not 100% accurate but her reading age is estimated at approximately 4 years old (2 years behind her peers) - Which based on my day to day interactions with her, I believe this to be pretty accurate. 

Ash had a major falling out with me last week - We were discussing words "him", "his", "her", and "she"... Not hard... She learned these 1 year ago. We were refreshing skills already acquired. She COMPLETELY lost her mind. She started screaming at me saying "I can't do it"...... Back track for a minute..... I HATE THAT PHRASE!!!!!! Unless you try, and find that you really can not do it, that's one thing... But she already had it in her head that she couldn't do it. She never even bothered to try. Then she started yelling at me saying "your not even a teacher, you don't want to help me".... No one wants to hear those words EVER. But when it is your own child, it stings more than anything you could experience. I wanted to cry, I was done at that point. But I didn't show her my emotions. I remained clam and basically said that I am the ONLY one that has been going to bat for her and investing in her education. I let her theatrical display continue for 3 hours. Yea..... This was a serious defiant moment in her life and certainly not her finest hour(s). 

At that point I had lost her. No more learning was going to take place that day. She was so worked up and so far gone that there was no reigning her in from anything. Pick the battles you fight right? Well, this was not one of them. Ash - 1 Mom - 0. Tomorrow is a new day.

The rest of the week was pretty good. We created a Word Wall in our kitchen wall, a place that is always visible and she can access it anytime. She actually does look at it multiple times a day and recite what she knows. Every word on the wall she told me to put there. 

Introduce new words daily and we slowly add them one she has a fluency and a visual relationship with the word

These are the "C" words that she wanted to put up on the wall - cat, car, can, and cap.

Well that's all for now. I will write again at the end of the week with the past week's progress :-)

Things are Looking Positive!

Before I go into the week she had let me start by explaining my meeting with Sakhalin International School. So first lets rewind to November 2014 - Ash had some "trial" runs in the school setting to see how it would work out. Long story short it was disastrous on epic proportions. She was disruptive, didn't quite get the flow of how the classroom was run (which is understandable when coming into a classroom 3 months late), didn't share, threw tantrums... All in all a VERY bad experience. The students were also overwhelmed with Ash and that is not fair. 

I have the unique position of being a certified teacher and a mom of a SPED kid so I can neutralize myself when it comes to these situations. I sometimes want to go full blown "mamma bear" mode and demand this and demand that but I have to understand that the other kids matter as well. I have to think about what is best for the other students in her class. Is my daughter going to cause them to get distracted? Not work? Fall behind because the teacher has to constantly redirect my child? These are things that I can look at objectively and see both sides. I want the  absolute best for my child but not at the expense of another child's education. 

Like I said, I knew going into this assignment that the International School might not be a good fit for her so after the not so well integration I pulled her out and started a very regimented and structured home school session for her here. Since November I have seen improvements in her behavior and attentiveness so I requested a meeting with the Head Master to discuss "testing the waters" one more time. 

The school is on break from April 4-April 26 so she will begin Monday April 27 from 830am-12. They have allowed me to be in the classroom with her to start with and they will slowly phase me out. They want her to interact socially with other children her age in an educational setting. She has some social deficits but this is not due to her "not" being in school. She has no clue that her and Mike go to different schools. She also does not understand the concept of "friends" and it does not phase her one bit. Some of the kids here will ask for a play date but that is something that Ash would never ask for. She does not "get it" or understand that concept. 

So we will see how this works out. If it fails then I will just go back to doing what I am doing. Fingers Crossed that it all goes well :-)

On with the week she has had....

Monday March 23
Today was very much "Math Heavy" - This is her weak spot. The simplest concepts are the hardest for her. Ash can count until she is blue in the face but the minute I say "count 5 beans" she is LOST. No clue what to do. She will grab one and just say "one". they I say "ok.... now we need 4 more" and I get the same deer in headlights look. Then a crying fits breaks out and you'd think I was trying to kill her with how hysterical she gets.  

It took a while but we pushed through it. I know for a fact she has no clue what she did but I am hoping that constant repetition will help her "figure it out"

We also wrote numbers 1 to 20. Mine are the black ones and hers are the red. First time she ever wrote out her numbers so I would say it was a success!

We then moved on to "more or less" type of problems. OH MAN!!!! Crisis outbreak over this topic! I was running a benchmark assessment on her and one of the questions was:

"Elsie has 15 whistles and Zach has 7 whistles. Who has more?" Visuals were provided and she had no idea. So we simplified the already simplified :-) 

I grabbed the white board and drew out 15 dots on one side and 7 dots on the other side. I explained that the Alligator was SOOOO hungry and he needed to eat the bigger side. The side with the MOST dots. She knows "big" and "small" so that why I went with that vocabulary. Still the concept was lost. she kept pointing to 7 and when I would say no she would choose the correct one but didn't know why that was correct. We did the "Hungry Alligator" (>) or (<) for almost 2 hours and made different games out if it where she had to get up and move. 

Hehe I used pool balls from the billiard tables and placed them in piles and told her to be the hungry alligator and choose the pile with the most "food" - the outcome was a bit more successful but the success rate was still below 50%. 

We created patterns too! This she enjoyed because I have her make them herself. She struggles with patterns and what comes next. This is what she created:

Tuesday March 24

This day was kind of a wash - We were in the middle of a blizzard, transportation was not sure if they were opening or closing, worried that my other son was going to stranded at school because roads were too bad to drive on, not sure if my husband was getting stuck at work for the same reason.... Stressful and hectic day. 

We stayed home and did a little bit of work. She has an account with ABCMouse.com and worked on her learning path for a while. We did some activities with her Preschool Prep series as well. Today's focus was Blends such as "sk", "st", "dr", "pl", "br" and so on. She is getting pretty good at recognizing these but still very much a work in progress. 

Wednesday March 25

It was a beautiful and sunny day, roads were good but for whatever reason the school was closed until 1pm. Well, Mike is in Pre-Nursery and can only go until 12pm so yet again.... another day home for him. Though not a "wash day"... It could have been better. Mike was homeschooled today with Ash :-) We all went up to the community center and worked for a few hours. Ash more so than Mike. To him it was more of a game. Today's focus was "Feelings and Emotions" - They seemed to enjoy this. 

I started by displaying different flashcards of emotions on the floor and called out "Find Happy", "Find Sad".... and so on. We made a game out of it and they had some fun.

Next I had some flashcards that had different scenes and they had to tell me how they feel when.......

I then had them face the wall and I removed a feeling and they had to tell me which one was missing

According to the lesson plan this was supposed to be an hour lesson but I created different activities and stretched it out to 3 hours.. All in all it was a pretty good and fun day :-)

We finished by having her draw out some faces with different emotions. It turned into a different kind of family tree :-) Mike clearly as not interested as you can hear him running amuck in the background!

It is not in the video but she really enjoyed drawing "Angry" - we see in some cartoons that "Angry" is coupled with steam coming out of the ears so she draws steam now! Its kind of funny actually. She tells me "they need the angry whiskers mom" - Too cute! 

Thursday March 26th

Today was a pretty successful day. We reviewed yesterday's feelings and emotions and continued on with directions. Ash has difficulty with her "Positional" words such as left, right, beside, in front, behind, next to, under, on top of..... Not so much under and on top of but the others are very much a work in progress. 

I have a learning tool from Lakeshore Learning all about positional words and it is a manipulative so she can physically place the objects in the prompted location. 

We had lots of tears over this activity with the "behind" and "in front" positions.