This weekend we went on our first Colorado camping trip. The weather on Saturday was fabulous, and it was a beautiful weekend for camping. The night was COLD. I got little to no sleep because I spent the night concerned that the kids were wiggling out of their covers and trying to keep the dog from doing her business in the tent. They told us when we paid that they DO have bears, so we needed to be certain to read the bear safety pamphlet. This news did nothing to help me sleep. Every little noise I heard made me wonder if it was a bear. I didn't want to get out of the tent to go to the bathroom because I was concerned about encounting a bear on the way. The bathroom was NO where near our campsite, so I had to drive to the bathroom. While camping seems like fun when we are roasting hot dogs and eating outside, I rarely find sleeping outside in a tent to be as pleasant. The kids slept well, but we were happy to be home in our own bed. After camping, we went for breakfast in Woodland Park at a donut shop that served donuts and cinnamon rolls among other things that were GIGANTIC! They have a cinnamon rolls called "Bigger than my head" cinnamon roll. It really was bigger than a person's head. Regardless of the rough night sleeping and the thought of bears, we had a nice time being together. The kids really miss seeing Jeff during the week when he is at night school.
Last week, we had parent teacher conferences, and I went to meet with both kid's teachers. They weren't the most pleasant conferences. The teachers were all nice, but it is not always fun when you don't get a lot of positive things back from the conference. Zhenya is apparently going for class clown. He is being very silly at school in an attempt to get a laugh. Academically, they have made some changes to his work, and I am seeing an improvement in the work being sent home. I had to talk with him about the appropriate time for silliness. This is not a new conversation because we have been experiencing excessive silliness at home as well. We have frequent talks about how much silliness is okay. I try to help him understand that too much of anything is not good. A little silly is alright, but too much is not alright. I can't tell you how many times I have said that to him! Leeza's conference wasn't much different than I expected. I just find it frustrating to hear her teachers say that she is not able to do anything on her own or that she is not showing progress. It completely perplexes me because she is not doing things for her school assessments that she does for us at home. For instance, her recent school assessment indicated that she only knew 6 letter sounds. I checked her at home the next day, and she knew all her letter sounds except 6. She has moments when she doesn't want to even try and I wonder if she is doing that at school. She has a lot of learned helplessness or if she really can't consistently reproduce what she knows. I struggle with having her compared to her other ESL (English Second Language) peers because she didn't come from where they came from. No english or not, most of her ESL peers come from a home with a parent or two with whom they have always been. Leeza came to us with NOTHING in the academic world and very little in the self care/help area. As is common with institutionalized children, she is very developmentally delayed. I guess I am glad they want to see how much help (Special Education) they can get her, but I also feel that is should be acknowledge how far she really has come from the little girl we brought home. She has made progress...even if it isn't the same as the other kids. If we were back in Tennessee, her teachers would have had a better understand of where she came from. I told her teacher that her teacher in Tennessee would be so excited to see what Leeza can do now because it wasn't anywhere close to where she was last school year. At home, we work on all the things we need to work on for kindergarten. Some nights like tonight, we both get quite frustrated. She has sight words to memorize and she can remember like, can, we, and go. However, no matter how many times we practice and review she can not recall the word THE. It frustrates me because I am a special education teacher. I am suppose to have strategies and techniques to teach children things in order to encourage retention of the information. THE is just not sticking. One minute she knows it, and the next minute she doesn't. I don't feel like she has enough language to do any cognitive testing to determine her intellectual abilities. I hate for her to be frustrated with academics, but she gives up so easily when she thinks it is too hard. I just don't know what to do! The only thing I have decided is that THE is not a big part of her vocabulary. She almost never uses it. In fact, I don't know if she uses it at all. She tends to say "e" when we would normally say "the". I am having this thought as I sit here and write this. This post is getting too long, so I will close. Just blogging my frustration is truly helpful!! Any tips on this topic are welcome!!
