Wednesday, May 25, 2011

she's reading

Last night I sat down with the kids while they did their homework. We have Abby working on some extra homework about time. Of course she is less than thrilled with the extra couple pages of homework, but she's struggling a bit with the concepts of time, the am and pm, the big hand and the little hand and so on. Seems better to be proactive.

Maya on the other hand was begging for extra work. So I grabbed a first grade reading workbook from my stash (thanks ML!!) thinking there might be something in there I could modify for her to do. She whipped through the two pages she could do on her own and was asking me to find her more to do. So I sat with her, my intention being to read her the short story and help her answer the related questions. I put my finger under the first word on the page so she could follow along with what I was reading......... and....... she started reading it herself!!! With very minimal help from me.

Mike was loading the dishwasher and he stopped dead in his tracks when he realized it was Maya's voice he was hearing and not Abby's. Not only did she read the whole story (about 6 sentences) on her own, but she understood what she had read and could repeat the story back to me in her own words. I almost fell off my chair. Then she read and answered the questions that went along with it. And we did it all again tonight with the next story in the book. Two of the words in tonight's story were seahorse and octopus and she read them both with no help from me. It's been an amazing couple of days. I am insanely proud and blown away by my Little MyPie.

And then we have Abby, who put her head down on the kitchen table and had a little cry because even she could recognize how easy this school stuff is for Maya. And it just isn't fair. And are you proud of me too? Poor thing. I wish it all came easier to her and I know she wishes the same. I can already see it's going to be a delicate balance making sure they are both getting what they need to excel at school. I only hope I can figure out how to do that.

1 comment:

Bibliomama said...

UGH, how horrible...and wonderful...and tough to navigate. I have two kids who have quite different strengths, but they're three years apart and different genders, so it doesn't show up as much. I'm sure you'll figure it out, but .... ugh.