My Newest Adventure

How It All Started

Pinterest..it all started on Pinterest. At first I just loved the ability to organize things that caught my attention, or were interesting to me. I could pin it, and go back whenever I wanted to, to access it..it was wonderful. Then I came across preschool postings, games and activities homeschooling moms were doing. Having had two girls both with speech issues, I wanted to give my youngest the best start so I thought I would gather preschool ideas and planned that by the time she was 2 or 3 I would have an arsenal of things to do with her during the day while the other two girls were at school. Then I got the idea to do weekly themes. So I started organizing ideas into group, and weeks and themes and months. I finally came up with 56 themes (so far).

(Jump forward 2 months)

M daughters kindergarten class went on field trip in October to the pumpkin patch. During the ride home, her teacher and I, whom I have known for 3 years, told me that between the two kindergarten classes and 45 students, that 30 tested in the red zone in September, and that with the new common core curriculum being phased in this year at our school that it was frustrating to say the least. So I did what I could..I started volunteering every afternoon mostly in my daughters class at first, but by the end i was going between the two classes, working mostly with the intervention kids or the kids struggling with one particular topic. I also helped out with sight word testing, and test prep for the December test. I was in LOVE with helping. After nine weeks however, my youngest who was only 6 months old at the time was not so happy with me being away for 3 hours every afternoon so I had to cut my time down. I volunteer for field trips to chaperon,  come to all the parties to help dish out food, hand out the treat bags, and I usually read to the kids at the end of the day. The kids LOVE it when I show up, they tell me how much they miss me and they spend the whole day telling me about their accomplishments and thanking me for the help I gave them. So of course I love it too!!

Jump to November. At a parent teacher conference for my oldest, it was suggested that she might have AD/HD and a little bell went off in my heart and in my head. My daughter wasn't just way too smart, way too strong-willed, way too stubborn and socially awkward. She had a reason for temper tantrums, she had a reason for being so easily upset over things. She was formally diagnosed in January and after 3 weeks of debating with myself and discussions with daddy I made the move to have her begin medication February 1st.  During that meeting, I also learned a lot about my daughter. She was struggling not with curriculum really...but with how the curriculum was taught, and having to learn to do math 10 different ways - ways that are to her foreign...something that came so easy to her has now become a chore. Her tests are riddled with lost marks for not showing all the steps to the strategies..her right answers are obsolete.  Writing was always something she hated, but now she has to write so much more with common core, that any writing I ask her to do is a struggle of "this is boring" or "do I have too?" I also found out how our local school was dividing the kids up for spelling and reading groups. I can't say my first impressions of common core based on her class has given me any confidence with the new curriculum.

Jump to December. The kindergarten kids were tested over two days.  Each of the 45 students in our kindergarten classes were given a quick review right before their tests. 30 were in the green, 10 were in the yellow and only 5 were still in the red. Of those 5 one has a severe speech impediment, and the other 4 are intervention kids. All five of them were in the class I spent less time with. Then it hit me, that 1 on 1 time makes a huge difference. The games and worksheets I made to help them were really working. My own kindergartner although still going through some speech classes tested in the green, however her test scores were not nearly as high as the pretests she had done with me or her teacher. It was at this point that we were at home adjusting our routine and discipline practices to cope with AD/HD to see if it made any difference it did, positively for our oldest, but it had a negative affect on my middle girl.

This was when I realized that I needed to give each girl some dedicated 1 on 1 time. So each night I spend an hour with one while the other has 1 hour of media time, it can be the computer, TV, or the ipad. This hour worked out well for my oldest, she would do her homework, read, and we would talk, if she had a good night we would have time to play silly games or draw pictures together. However my kindergartner had a hard time filling up the hour. Her usual homework was not cutting it. She was resistant to sight word practice, she was stubborn about reading, she outright refused to write neatly when we would practice letters or numbers saying "but we do this at school". She talks nonstop but it isn't conversation material, she is a little bit of a gossiper, something I am not very good talking about or listening too. So I would try to focus when she would go on and on about who did what and said what but I kept finding myself unconsciously tuning her out.  I knew I needed something fresh to engage her academically so I did some research, and I found teacherspayteacher.com. She was reveling in the new work, i got a little peace and quiet so that when she would talk, i could focus. I was in heaven.

Then my creative juices really got rolling.

My preschool weekly themes morphed into weekend lessons for the older two. My creative side got a new outlet. My girls got more interesting fun ways to practice skills they were learning at school. And our household got a lot calmer....there was less free fight time and more structured fun time. My oldest started to flourish, my middle girl started to be more cooperative and my youngest started sleeping a little better during afternoon nap time.

Because I am just starting out it is a lot of work. I also have to create games and worksheets that can be used multiple times, by multiple levels of ability. These challenges keep me up late, and working hard for many hours during the day each day, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. I invested a good chunk of our tax return into TpT products for both girls. I bought a really good printer, a better laminate machine, a filing cabinet, a ton of laminate pouches, file folders and a cutting board. I learned how to navigate power point, invested time and money into clip art. Polished up my writing skills. I learned about common core standards and how to apply them into projects. And in a few short weeks I created 30 projects. All of them, i gave for free to my local school kindergarten teachers. On St. Patrick's Day I got to see them use a test prep math packet I made. I was blown away, i got so many hugs and requests for me to make more.

These are my first steps into blogging about my journey...as a mom and my steps towards being a little more!