Today is August 10th. School begins August 31st. I am embarrassed to say that I have hardly spent any time going over letters, numbers, sounds-- nothing with Simon this past summer. We were doing really well at one point with the summer library reading schedule. But, I have become way too lax and now I have to play catch-up. Today I forced Simon to sit down and work on his upper and lower case letters. I also made him write numbers 1-20. It was like pulling teeth. Then, I gave him a timed test. I had him read as many words as he possibly could within a minute. I could tell he was intentionally messing up which lit a fuse within me. I became totally impatient with him and started raising my voice. At this point I remembered back to my sophomore year in high school. I was having trouble in chemistry and my dad sat me down to tutor me on moles. Now I must preface this by saying that I love my dad dearly, but he does not have the best tutoring skills. He is smarter than anyone I know. He received his degree in Chemistry. But, he spent well over an hour trying to teach me about moles and other chemistry nonsense. Voices were raised and tears were shed (on my part). I still to this day do not know what the heck a mole is. With this memory that was brought to the forefront of my brain, I decided that I should probably take it easy on my 6 year old son who has spent the summer playing and lounging and doing anything other than school work.
I was a little worried that because of my bad parenting skills (being lazy) Gillian wouldn't remember anything from Kindergarten, but she is doing great in school (we started 3 weeks ago). I have patience problems too, and sometimes I have to wait for Josh to work with Gillian so that she and I are both not crying.
ReplyDelete