Samantha's first blog

Posted By pamelamyers on February 25, 2015

I haven’t said much about how Sam has been doing in school since the beginning of the year, but she is doing great! The beginning of this year was a little tough. Even though she loves school, it was difficult for her this year having to make all new friends again. Sam is so introverted that it makes reaching out to other kids a scary experience for her. She does have her friends, Ashlee and Ava, and after a while, she finally started wanting to stay to run around after school in the little courtyard like she used to last year. I was so glad she wanted to do that. She even is making friends with some of the boys in her class which is shocking. Last year she had no use for the boys, and aside from Franny and Michael, I don’t think she even could have told me any of their names. This year, she knows all her friends names and talks quite frequently about the boys she sits with at her table and the boys who sit next to her in circle. She knows what they like and don’t like (if I hear about Nicholas and his love of dinosaurs one more time…yikes) and even made a birthday card for one of the boys who sits next to her in circle that we mailed to his house. She was invited to Ashlee’s birthday party this year and was so excited to go. All the girls in her class were there and they were so excited to see each other. It is so sweet.

She is really learning her letters and her numbers and has even started working on “sight words” which is a foreign concept to me. We didn’t learn to read that way when I was a kid, not that I recall, but it seems all kids start out this way in preschool and kindergarten, learning words that they don’t even sound out, but just “know” on sight. Words like and, the, me, for, etc. Whatever works I guess. Sam didn’t seem too interested in the concept at first, but now she definitely is into it. She is always finding sight words everywhere we look, in her books, on tv, printed on all kinds of signs and packages.  She has also started sounding out words like cat  and cow and other easy three letter words. She can spell a few too, like mom, dad, and her favorite and first real word she learned to spell — stop.

We had her parent teacher conference and her teacher said she was doing very well, is coming out of her shell, but sometimes seems a little reluctant to work on her papers in class. Her teacher said she knows that Sam knows the concepts, she just has to be pushed to either do her papers, or to do them with thought, and to not rush through them and thus make mistakes. I was concerned about this at first, but after talking to her, realized it is not that she doesn’t know the things she needs to know but rather, that she is bored with papers. Mark realized early on (and I much later) that Sam is definitely a hands on kind of learner. She does better with examples, with “doing” rather that being shown. Writing things on worksheets is not necessarily the way for her to learn concepts. So…I am trying to find other ways to help her grasp things and it seems to be working. Mark always says the best way to teach Sam something is to not let her realize you are trying to teach her, and he is right.

At any rate, school will be over before you know it and Sam will be off to kindergarten. She is all registered as of this week!

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