Nathan has had a wonderful first month of school. I was surprised that he right away started doing more than what was required of him:
* 3rd Graders are required to read 30 minutes a night; his goal is 60 minutes and most of the time he hits his goal, if not more
* When we met with his teacher, we talked about the Great Brain project. He volunteered to not only finish the one he started last year, but to also do another new project by the end of the school year
* His teacher gave us a cursive alphabet page and told us they'd start learning a few letters soon. All their work will need to be in cursive starting in January. I think it's been about 2 weeks since he got the paper, and I don't think they've started officially learning it in school. But he sat down for a few days and practiced the letters. He now signs his name in cursive and uses it fairly frequently in other writing!
* We started piano lessons (I'm the teacher) again this fall. I knew Nathan was less-than-thrilled. But after a week or so, he's buckled down and is usually very cooperative to practice and to do it right.
This last week we hit a small bump in the road. On Tuesday he brought home his spelling homework like usual. But since he had gotten 100% on the pre-test, his teacher gave him 20 new challenge words instead. Nathan was NOT happy: "But these words are
hard, Mom! I want to do the regular list."
I talked to him about how most kids have to study the regular words throughout the week, and that these challenge words are putting him on the same level as everyone else. Now he has to study a little just like his classmates. But if he just did his spelling assignments throughout the week, I'm sure he'd memorize the words fairly easily. He was still mad, but he went ahead and wrote his words 3 times each on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, Nathan brought home the regular list -- the one he had passed on the pre-test -- and insisted that he was going to do that instead of the challenge words. He did not answer when I asked if he got permission from his teacher to switch lists. I got distracted helping Benjamin and then on a PTA phone call. He came to me to sign off his homework, which I wouldn't do since he didn't do the challenge words. When I went to write in his reading minutes later that night, I noticed he had written his own note on his homework: "I did not want to do the challenge words. Nathan" I figured that he's a big boy and could work it out with his teacher and would have to face the consequences if there were any.
The next morning I was in the teacher work room at the school working on some PTA things when his teacher came in to make copies. So I talked to her about it, and she said that Nathan would be tested on the challenge words.
That afternoon, Nathan came home from school in tears and stomped straight to his room. After I got the other boys settled, I went in to talk to him. Mrs. B had told him that not only would he be tested on the challenge words, but that now he needed to complete the week's worth of assignments for BOTH sets of spelling lists! After a few more tears and pouting (including telling me that next week he's going to miss some on the pre-test on purpose so he won't have to do the challenge words), he buckled down and went to work on his spelling. I was amazed that he had a good attitude the rest of the night. It did take most of the rest of the evening, but he got it done. We did have to dig the challenge word list out of the kitchen garbage can -- it was not pretty at that point! And he had to re-do the 3-times-each challenge words, since he'd thrown that away too!
ABC order on "medium other than pencil & paper"
He got 100% on the spelling test. And I think he learned the lesson that he just needs to do his assignments right the first time!
This week he came home with the regular spelling list -- he had missed 3 words on the pre-test. He insists that it was not intentional, that he enjoyed the challenge words once he worked on them. Do I believe him? I don't know. Hopefully he'll be bringing home the challenge words again soon!
