Princess costume: lacks lining, hem and final fitting. This is more work than it sounds like.
Penguin costume: still just a glimmer in Carl’s eye. I need to get with it, and yet here I am, typing away in fine procrastinatory form.
Our weekend was devoted to a couple of other kid's birthday parties, some bike riding for the kids, a Diwali/campaign party for a friend and a late night of playing cards on Saturday night, my subsequent hangover on Sunday morning, pumpkin carving, pumpkin seed roasting, and forcing Carl to take a bath. He likes baths once he gets in there; he’s just in a mood to fight with me about most things. There were also disagreements with him this weekend about peeing, putting on shoes, getting into the car, tooth brushing, eating veggies….you get the picture. He’s worse for Rod, though, I have it easier in some ways.
Exciting news: Carl is learning to write his name! He’s got the C down pretty well. There’s a thing in the middle that could be the a or the r (and I’m not sure which), and then the l, which, Carl informs me, is like a 1! Also, his drawings are getting more representational. This one is either a monster or a robot, complete with his signature:

Ruby’s class is going on a field trip to the science museum tomorrow. I am the backup chaperone. I hope I don’t have to go, because of my sewing deadline, and because it’s the day I help out with reading in Carl’s classroom. I was supposed to go buy Ruby a bus pass before tomorrow, but it’s a complicated procedure and I forgot, so she’ll have to pay the whole $1 in cash each way. I think it’s really great that the early elementary teachers at the school make the kids go on field trips by city bus. They feel it’s important for everyone to learn how to ride the bus, and it’s less expensive than hiring a school bus. It makes for some interesting stories, too.
I have a standing appointment to listen to kids reading in Carl’s class on Tuesdays, and in Ruby’s on Fridays. Carl doesn’t really know that I go to his class, because I sneak in while he’s away napping and try to leave before he gets back, to avoid an ugly scene. The actual reading is tedious, I have to say. Why can’t someone make beginning books that aren’t so dull and idiotic? I guess Dr. Seuss did, but they don’t use them in schools. Instead, there are BOB books, HOP books, Open Court/SRA atrocities, and many more that are similar. I think even Dick and Jane were more fun, but to look on the bright side, I guess there are a lot more choices nowadays.
In Carl’s class, the teacher is giving me one or two little books to read with all of the reading kindergarteners in turn. A couple of them are already strong readers and the books are way too easy. For some kids, they’re way too hard and so completely not useful. For others, they’re at about the right level, but they’re deadly dull. I need to talk to the teacher about choosing different books for different kids based on their level. I suspect she’s just trying to ease them into reading aloud a few times a week and still getting to know their various levels, but I think they could move on a bit now.
Plus, the kindergarten kids haven’t learned any sight words (high-frequency words that you can’t just sound out) yet, so the going is harder than it has to be for the ones who are otherwise getting the hang of it. I did not enjoy drilling Ruby on sight word flash cards last year, but now I see why we were given the task. When I go to Ruby’s class now, it’s very obvious which of the first graders have done serious work on sight words and which haven’t.
The process of learning to read is so mysterious to me. Ruby’s teacher isn’t the first person to tell me that a lot of it is purely developmental; some kid’s brains are just ready for it faster than others. And yet some of them seem to gain velocity, confidence, and skill so quickly. Others seem good enough at the basics, but need to work more on sight words and to practice. I worry that some of them don’t practice at home, that they don’t have reading role models and trips to the library and all, and that they’ll think the boring little phonetic readers at school are all there is and never get excited about books. There is also a small third group of kids, the strugglers who just can’t seem to get to the level of the others. Do their eyes skip around too much? Is there something in their brains that makes sounding out words extra hard? I want to help, I want it to be fun, and I end up feeling like I’m torturing them for 10-15 minutes a week.
As for Ruby, she seems to be making some good reading progress these days, to my joy and relief. She seems well within the pack of first graders in her class, and most of them are labeled “gifted,” so that’s a good thing. Her school is doing a fundraiser for the March of Dimes, where kids ask for a donation for each book they read. Rod and I were less than thrilled when this envelope came home, and I was going to gripe to the principal about my kid being encouraged to fundraise for an organization without my consent. But then Ruby enthusiastically announced that she was going to read “11 to 19 books!” so that she could get the silver medal (which she preferred to gold). She agreed that Rod and I could be her sole sponsors and we wouldn’t go around asking our friends for money. Under those terms, I decided that anything that made Ruby want to read more was a great thing. She’s spent the last four or five days reading every chance she gets; I think she’s up to 13 books.
Ruby reads aloud; the idea of reading silently to herself hasn’t quite sunk in yet. She hasn’t tackled a whole chapter book on her own yet, but she’s reading some fairly long and complex picture books. She’s a bit lazy, in that she doesn’t like to stop and ask for help or figure things out. Instead, she’ll guess at a word or skip over bits. Sometimes she scrambles up the words in sentences a little. She’s just starting to read with expression, which is cute. I worry a little that the selection of things she likes to read is too limited, even though all the experts say that a steady diet of fairy books/comic books/Captain Underpants/whatever shouldn’t be a concern, that kids do move on to “better” books eventually. And Captain Underpants is pretty darn funny, plus he is overwhelmingly captivating to Carl.
Last week in Ruby’s class I also helped her with a math lesson. She was working on adding four digit numbers and “carrying” sums over columns, like from the ones to the tens; I think this is called dynamic addition? I suppose I’d seen the Montessori demonstration of this version of the “exchange game” before, but it was so much fun seeing Ruby do it, with the light bulb coming on when she realized it was time to exchange the 10 single beads for a unit of ten, and then to swap the 10 “tens” for a “hundred.” Heck, addition made more sense to me by the time we’d done a couple of problems. Maybe there's something to this whole math business after all.
I guess I have to go sew something now. Tra-la-la!*
*Captain Underpants reference, get it?