Pages

Tuesday, July 08, 2014

Excited for preschool

It's probably no secret that I'm terrible at getting kids to go to bed. Or that my kids just don't sleep. Or something.

At this very minute, Benjamin is standing in his doorway with his cup and his bus and his car crying for me and I'm ignoring him because it's 9:00 PM and I've done the lullaby thing (more than once now) and he should be in bed. Andrew and I are playing good cop, bad cop with him.

The girls, on the other hand, are tucked into their beds. One is quietly reading the fifth Harry Potter book. The other is diligently practicing her handwriting. One will shut off her lamp at a decent hour and put herself to sleep (because she's my only child who enjoys sleeping). The other will need to be threatened and bargained with before she'll close her book for the night. But even though we sometimes have to end reading time with a fight (especially when I say, "Finish up that chapter and go to bed!" and Rachel happens to be just a page turn away from the end of the chapter because how dare I?!) I must say that literacy is one of my very best friends in motherhood.

Last night Miriam swaggered out of her bedroom with a fistful of papers. She didn't say a word, just held them up for me to see—first this side, then that side—a proud little smirk on her face the whole time.




5+5 = 10
10x10 = 100
100+2 = 1002
10+10 = 20
5+100 = 1005

I love how all of her numbers are backwards. Except for five. And zero.

I also love how 100+2 equals 1002 instead of 102. That literally reads 100 [and] 2.



This paper proves that she writes all of her numbers backwards. Except for five and zero (which we discovered above) and eight. So basically she can write five correctly (because it's virtually impossible to write 8 and 0 backwards).

Andrew wonders if the clock hanging in our living room is throwing her off. We picked it up in the UAE and it has Eastern Arabic numerals instead of the Western Arabic numerals we're used to in English. I'm not so sure that's throwing her off because she can't tell time, anyway, so I don't think she spends too much time staring at the clock.

This was another beautiful bit of math (I think Rachel was tutoring her):



After she fell asleep I sneaked back into her room to retrieve her notebook because I saw that she was working on a picture when I went in to sing her her lullaby and it was a pretty fantastic picture:


There were some other wonderful pictures scattered throughout her notebook (she hasn't yet learned to write on each page in order):



And then I saw this:


Miriam has a box of books at the foot of her bed and there's an Amelia Bedelia anthology in there that she's determined to read on her own (though it's a little more advanced than Dick and Jane).

Every drawing this girl makes, every sentence this girl writes amazes me. Doesn't that curly-tailed U on 'your' make you smile? If not, I am not sure we can be friends. Just kidding. Not kidding.

I have a hunch she's ready for preschool. Because this girl won't be starting kindergarten until 2015. 

No comments:

Post a Comment