First week of school done

Well Horse Girl and History Girl completed their first week of 3rd and 7th grades.

History Girl got placed into advanced math, which is awesome because to me it is a sign that other people besides me have seen the change in her attitude with regards to school. What she loves about her schedule this year is that even though PE is more or less required every other day of school, her schedule was so they couldn't fit it in the first semester so she got a waiver out of it. Maybe some parents would be upset about that, but I find school PE to be a waste of time if you have an active kid. Both of my girls are active kids. History Girl does the swim team. She walks miles to see historical buildings. PE or at least the PE at History Girl's school doesn't teach her athletics that she can use her whole life. It is stupid games that force the kids to compete against each other. History Girl is like me...she is fairly good at swimming...a sport she can do until she is 127 years old. She won't be playing mush ball or flag football when she is that age. So I think it is great that they couldn't fit PE into her schedule....I wish that I could figure out how she could make it not work for the rest of her schooling.

Horse Girl has this great teacher. I have worked with her for the last two years. Since I work to cover recesses and the lunch room and do paperwork for teachers so they don't have to and she was working as an Ed Tech, we got to know each other well. She has two kids....her oldest is in 5th grade. She taught for 10 years and then became a stay at home mom for 8-9 years and came back to work as an Ed Tech, then this 3rd grade teaching spot opened up and she got it. So this is the first time having her own classroom in 11 or 12 years. She is so excited. I love her attitude it is just wonderful. She and I have talked about Horse Girl's needs and we have been exchanging email daily.

Horse Girl's teacher told me about how Horse Girl advocated for herself, which lets me take a deep breath and relax. I think the fear of all parents of kids with LDs is that they will never learn how to advocate for themselves. It is something they need to learn to do and earlier the better. I didn't get the hang of it until I was in 8th grade and one of my teachers kept refusing to let me have the support that I was suppose to have. This was long before ADA so things were different, but I had an awesome Special Ed teacher who helped me advocate for myself. I have been trying to teach Horse Girl how to do it herself, so I was just so happy when she was able to.

Horse Girl's teacher requires the kids to record all reading that the kids do at home. I explained to her that Horse Girl does three different types of reading at home and what ones qualified as recordable reading. Horse Girl reads stuff at her reading level to work on her reading skills. We read to her and have her help us read and that reading is between her reading level and her comprehension level. The last type of reading Horse Girl does is at her comprehension level and we do that by buying books from Audible. The books from Audible are audiobooks that we download and put it on her iPod so she can "read" them. The benefit of the audiobooks is several she is able to improve her comprehension level, which for kids with reading LDs can be nearly impossible and can cause a kid to permanently get stuck at a level much lower then they should be at. Also the audiobooks help improve her vocabulary, there gets to be a point that a kid slows down their increasing vocabulary though what they hear around them and they increase their vocabulary through the written word and for a kid who has trouble reading means a small vocabulary. Lastly it lets Horse Girl know and be able to talk to her friends about the books that are popular in her peer group. Last year it was the Magic Tree House series, which are too hard for Horse Girl to read herself, but on audiobooks she "read" nearly all of them. This let her be able to talk to her peers about the books....sort of what people do at boring cocktail parties. :-) So audiobooks helps Horse Girl with those things. I was so pleased that Horse Girl's teacher agreed that Horse Girl can count all three type of reading on her reading record.

So I have been pleased with how well this first week has gone. My fingers and toes are crossed that things continue to go well.