Emmy has her first list of spelling words for the year. There are twelve of them and one night she has to write sentences with six of them and the next night she has to write sentences with the other six of them. The words are pretty simple like “back”, “dad”, “can”, etc. I especially like these two sentences that she wrote:
“Can you dig it?”
“My dad has a hairy back.”
Her challenge words for the week were “Tennessee” and “onomatopoeia”. Thankfully she told me what onomatopoeia means.
I found this box of devotionals for little girls that we started reading together last night. The first one was about a little girl who disobeyed and one of the followup questions in the devotional was asking if you have ever disobeyed. Emmy said “oh yeah! That is the story of my life!” Sadly, I can’t argue with that too much.
We are heading to Magic Springs this weekend and as we packed, I asked Emmy what swimsuit she wanted to take. She said, “my two piece of course, I don’t want my belly getting hot”. No, we certainly don’t want that.
I want to remember exactly the frustration I felt with this girl last night. One day when she is a successful woman and has a child of her own, I want to be able to remember exactly the way she made John and I feel last night. We have struggled consistently with her attention span and getting her to want to read. I have attributed it to her not being very strong at it so she doesn’t have a great desire to do it. I can’t say much about that—I am a self-professed numbers nerd; I was never strong in literary sciences. I want her to love to read and I want her to strive to excel in each and everything but that is about as far as we are getting—I want.
We struggle with pushing too hard and it being an issue that she hates while also requiring her to learn and it ends up being a delicate balance. Sunday night, we gave in and let her skip some of her work because we knew she was tired and I was afraid that we were fighting a losing battle. That meant that we had to do that work last night. So, we drew our lines and I told her not to get up from the dining room table until she was ready to read and she said she wasn’t reading. And both of those things happened. She sat there until it was time for bed. This morning, I woke her and carried her back to the chair. She had just a tiny bit of her homework that is due today to finish. Eventually, she did it and I told her when we get home from school today she gets back in the chair until the other work is done.
It is going to be a long week around the Burton Manor.
