First week of 2010

The first week went very smoothly indeed. Tammy works hard in her Ace books - math and English. She will finish the last of Grade 3 work in math soon and then start with Grade 4! This week she had to count money again and that was fine, but when I scored her measuring of pictures and drawn lines, the answers did not match those in the score book - only to find that the drawn lines in the book were not accurate at all! A line of 12.3 mm is given as 12 1/2 cm. I find this pretty shocking - should write to ACE. The lines they draw in the book, should be very accurate don't you think?

English is still Grade 2 level, but we are getting there. She is much more keen to do creative writing e.g. to write sentences with given words. On Thursday I stayed the afternoon while she did her homework and she really battled with making sentences with "isn't", "wasn't" etc. It is not that she doesn't know what the words mean, but to have to think up sentences is still hard for her.

On the grammar side, I find that the ACE books do not give enough drill work - she needs much, much more before she really grasps a concept. When she has to chose between three words e.g. to / too/ two and underline the correct one, she is usually able to do it, but when it comes to chosing the correct form of a verb, e.g the children is / are at school the alternatives seem to confuse her. I now try to get her to give the correct form of the verb, by simply writing the verb e.g "eat, ate, eaten" at the top of a couple of sentences with blanks where she has to write in the appropriate form of "eat". I also underline the timewords or auxiliary verbs to help her choose the correct form. So far it seems to work.

For reading we are busy with two books. I want her to read a Secret Seven book by Enid Blyton all by herself - I just give her monkey puzzle type questions on the story, which she has to score herself. The idea of the questions is just to make sure that she understands the story. I wrote meanings of new words in pencil above the few words that I thought she might struggle with, but they are few and far between. So far she seems thrilled with the book and that is my aim: to let her experience that reading by yourself can be great fun! For speech we practise asking and answering these questions orally.

The other book is another "High School Musical" story: this one is about school elections - a fun way to revise the whole voting process and the vocabulary that goes with it. (If we hadn't done Elections as a theme last year, I doubt whether she would understand anything of the story.) We read this book together: We read aloud together and she follows with her finger and we discuss the story as we go along. My aim is to keep on improving fluency of reading (eyemovements) as well as her vocabulary.

May the rest of the year be as much fun as the first week!

Big disappointment and a new challenge

Tammy and family will no longer by going to the States this year. It is a big disappointment to the children, but there it is. Tammy and I still check the $ exhange rate each day, and she plots it on her Excel graph, but there is no longer the urgent need to learn to mentally calculate how much an item of $36.99 would be in our currency. It was fun while it lasted though, and she has learnt a lot.

So what do we do now? She is busy with Unicorn School and it starts with the unicorns preparing for exams. Seeing that her brother is busy with exams too, I decided it might be a good thing for Tamerin to also write exams. It might help her to join in conversations when she visits with her cousins.

Sooo.... what to "study" besides math and spelling? We have had several discussions on government and elections last year and earlier this year, so we will revise notes again. I hope to make the "exam" very practical e.g. to look up the telephone number of a certain government department. Just exactly what should every citizen know about government? I suppose we'll stick to the structure and functions of the different "parts" of government, the names and logos of the main political parties and taxes... and anything that is in the news this month.

Language will mostly be "fill in the missing word" based on her reader and her history notes, spelling, and finding the verb/noun/ adjective or adverb. (I find that it is important to know the difference between, for instance, a noun and a verb when using a dictionary.) I would love for her to make her own sentences with certain words as well.

Other subjects will be sport: again because it helps Tamerin to understand what is going on when family and friends watch it. (She has written on her Father's Day card: "I love watching rugby with you.) Tallying up the scores also provides good math practice. In rugby (our favourite sport) a goal counts 5 points, the conversion kick 2 points, a penalty kick 3 points and a drop kick also 3 points. In cricket you have singles, two's, fours and sixes and then there are six balls to an over and in limited cricket only 50 overs....
But why, oh why do they count 15, 30, 40 in tennis??

The math exam will include multiplication (e.g. 325 x 6), division (e.g. 325 / 6), fractions, adding with tens and hundreds, subtraction, percentages, rounding of prices and counting of money and reading of amounts involving millions and thousands.

Before finalising the study material, I better check on our goals again.

Please Lord help me to choose the right stuff and the right method to revise, and please let Tamerin enjoy it.

Some statistics for her end of year report and "The Speech" progress

When typing text out of her reader, Tammy types about 4 words per minute: She still makes many mistakes, but she corrects them herself. If only I could get her to use the delete button or select and retype method more. She spends a lot of time getting the cursor in the right place, then she backspaces and only then does she type in the correction. I have never given her a computer test before, but wanted a "statistic" for her end of the year report, so that we can gauge progress next year. She thoroughly enjoyed it, and wanted a test for homework.

For her Excel test I gave her a few number to enter and to add and to change to Rand. (Our currency.) She used the autosum button with ease and went to Format, but there she got stuck. However, when I told her to click on "Cells", she immediately went to "Currency" and clicked on R.

She reads 28.5 words per minute. (Maximum score was 35 words.)

For her math's test she scored 100% for multiplication and 57% for adding with ones and tens. She knows her bonds, but she makes many mistakes with carrying over.

In October she pedaled 1.5 km at level 1 in 10 minutes. Now she pedals more than 2.5 km at level 2 in 10 minutes.

She started to stutter again....! I felt so dejected this morning when we did the Nativity puppet show, and she stammered so. (She looked happy enough?) We prayed and then had break and then I really prayed....

After break, she did some sewing before I suggested we practise her speech again. (practise spelled with an s in S.A.) She was very slow and uncertain in the beginning, but became more cheerful and self-confident as she progressed. AND SHE DID NOT STUTTER! And what's more, she did not want me to cut anything from the speech, in fact she wants to say more! Instead of saying "I enjoyed seeing the whales at Hermanus", she wants to say "I enjoyed seeing the whales in the Indian Ocean at Hermanus". Instead of saying "the story of how Jesus was born", she wants to say "the story of how Jesus, the Saviour of the world, was born."!!

Thank you, thank you God! PLEASE help Tammy on Thursday. It will be so humiliating for her to cancel the whole speech now, and it will even be worse, if it does not go well on Thursday. Please free her tongue and her mind. You can do anything!