a lazy sunday to reflect

It is one of those perfect days for being lazy. First of all, it's Sunday and I got a huge amount of work done around here yesterday, so I am allowed to be lazy. That in itself seems perfect. Second, the weather in Michigan has changed, with a snap of chilly air and gray, gloomy skies. A perfect day for propping up the pillows, crawling under the down comforter and turning up the electric blanket, and reading a book that's been on the shelf waiting for me to spare an afternoon. And that's exactly what I plan to do.

But first I wanted to get a few thoughts down about D's first week as a first grader. His teacher is not a big proponent of homework so he does not come home with anything in his new orange backpack but his lunchbag and a few papers he completed during the school day. Not quite sure how I feel about that yet.

David was tested this week on reading and writing. Every first grader in our school is tested by one of our two school reading specialists. While he did great on the reading (no surprise), his writing is not on par with his reading. Yes, his handwriting is beautiful but while we were doing reading decoding and reading comprehension, phonics, and math over the summer, I somehow forgot to teach him WRITING, you know, as in sentences, stories, The Great American Novel! Oh my goodness. What the heck was I thinking? I guess I wasn't, and I'm a teacher!

So when I cornered, er... happened to run into the Reading Specialist who assessed David and rifled through her paperwork until I found his scores, I discovered his reading looks great but his encoding and sentence construction skills are certainly less than I desire. Still, with absolutely no help from his dear ol' teacher-mom with the Masters who helps kids learn to read and write everyday, D has managed to decipher the beginning and ending sounds of words but usually loses the medial sound(s). It was discovered that he also sometimes has complete reversals of the letters in his words; for example, he might spell d-o-g as g-o-d. Yikes! As a learning disabilities specialist, a couple of alarms immediately went off but, hey, if I was a doctor I would also probably have every disease known to man so, while I had a few concerns, I am trying to put it all into perspective.

Wow. Who woulda thunk first grade would be so hard. On me.

So this is what we started to do to remedy the cold hard fact that I let my little Einstein down. We are writing one or two sentences before school everyday. We are also starting some spelling of just the first few high frequency words. We will see how it goes. I don't want to push him too hard but I want him to gain ground. I want him to be a successful student.

After the first day of school I asked D, "What is your favorite part of first grade?" He said, "Being with my friends!" Spoken like the sweet and friendly boy that he is.

Today, after a full week of school and the additional "fun" of working on his spelling and sentence construction, I again asked D what his favorite part of school is so far. "Hmmm..." he contemplated for several seconds, putting a finger to his chin before saying matter-of-factly, "It's being in the same building that you are in."

Wow.

That sure did melt this mom's heart. And it put into perspective what is really important. It really doesn't matter if D is the best student in the whole wide world. He is still going to be this teacher's pet.