End of May Update

Two more weeks until school is out! The girls are excited, but at the same time asking about going to summer school. I'm thankful they love school.

Callie has made huge strides the last month or so. She is reading so well and getting more and more confident that she can read bigger words. She's been working more on writing words in school, and since she's started doing that her reading has really taken off. I commented to one of her teachers about this and she reaffirmed that building words before reading is the Montessori way. I guess it's easier to take the sounds in your head and put them into a word, but to decode what someone else is trying to say is a whole other thing. Callie is also becoming more willing to work on writing cursive. She has really drug her feet on learning how to write cursive (or anything other than block, actually) but lately is writing lowercase letters and actually asking her teachers for cursive work- Yay! Callie says her favorite work is "the moveable alphabet, but not really." She likes it, she says, but likes some matching work where she matches words to a corresponding picture. Her favorite part of the day is "pick up time" b/c I pick her up and she's so happy. Ahhh.

Emmy Lou is enjoying school too. I used to think she was going to be a doctor, but now I think she is destined to be a teacher. She plays school constantly. And she'd make a really good teacher too. Her favorite part of school, she says, is doing work with her friends. I'm so thankful they are in Montessori. I recall my elementary days- a lot of times I sat in a desk facing the back of the classroom in a corner b/c I talked too much. I was bored and wanted to socialize. Emmy's very, very social and I can just imagine the trouble she'd get into if she wasn't allowed to talk to her friends as much is she is now. She's able to talk and it's constructive. That makes me happy. Her favorite work is command cards, which she says isn't supposed to teach her anything, it's just for fun. She says one card says "throw an eraser across the room" and she gets to throw an eraser across the room. Her other favorite work is "sentence analysis" which she just recently got a lesson in. She wants me to explain the lesson (she's over my shoulder as I write this). You write a sentence down and you identify the object, verb and you put black arrows on the subject and the object. She also likes checkerboard, which Shad and I actually had lessons on when we went to Montessori Journey & Discovery and I COULD NOT do it AT ALL. Very confusing to me. I could do bead board, but not checkerboard. Shad found humor in this, but I did understand the bead board better than he did (at least initially I did). Emmy is not over my shoulder anymore, she's lost interest, and I've hid the fact that checkerboard was difficult for me so as not to taint her perception of it.

And my little guy. The last three weeks or so I've gotten worried about him. He's turned into a bit of a brat. He was my 100% sweetheart and now he's nuts! He insists on drinking "Elmo milk" or "Fishy milk"- his milk has to be in an Elmo cup or Nemo cup or else he throws a temper tantrum. He grabs something the girls are working on, puts it behind his back, says "Mine mine mine" and walks away w/ an ornery look on his face. He tells us all "No" all the time. He hit Emmy and called her a "bad boy". He went through a phase where he was biting all of us, but that seems to be gone, thank God. That was the one time I called him a bad boy, and has he hung onto that phrase. He bit me so hard and I sat him down and said "no biting! Bad boy!" and explained to him that he could not bite, that it hurt, etc. He cried and acted like he had hurt feelings that I was upset with him, got up, laughed, and bit Emmy. Whoa, that was scary. He's done w/ that now though (fingers crossed). And while he still 90% my sweetheart, he's showing this 10% rebel side which takes great joy in tormenting the rest of us. He's still talking up a storm, starting to string more words together (bye bye dada). He still isn't eating much, which is why, I guess he still weighs only 20 1/2 lbs.