a bit of bragging....

wow...my beautiful 4 year old is doing SOOOOOOOOO GREAT on his schooling....this week, he RE started on his phonics book. i had to stop because at the first, he had not been "getting" it...it was a bit advanced for him (K-2)....WELL, i started it up again this week and he just FLEW THREW IT!! he was understanding BEGINING constantane & understanding ENDING constanace....it goes by ONE letter at a time...and he learned how to figure out the ENDING of a word (the letter) and the the BEGINING of the word (ex if it shows HA_ and has a picture of the word ham, he will say what the picture says and then sound out what the letters they provide and then figure out that the last letter is M!!) he could not do that before! and he is sounding out everything and he is REALLY doing GREAT GREAT on giving me what a word or object starts with (letter)!! he is doing SOOOOO GOOD!! his phonics is GREAT, he is doing numbers and can count (most days) to a hundred and wants to learn to count to a hundrend in SPANISH! and his writing is really coming along. we practice everday on his writing...

alex and his letters A-M


ALEX AND HIS LETTERS N-Z


MY CUTIE!! :)

i had started to panic because there was an article in sundays paper (where i will get some of my quotes) about KINDERGARDEN and how it is now the NEW 1st grade....there is no more napping, there is no more recese and it is all about ACADEMICS....wow...think back to your own kindergarden years....nap time on a towel...going to get the milk for snack time.....playing in the yard and in our classroom....can you believe it no more?! that is such a BIG STEP for these kids to take when they FIRST leave their home for school, some for the FIRST TIME to be hit with all this right off....there are KIDS being HELD BACK in kinder!!! a teacher stated "Anything that takes a lot of time, like finger painting, has been pushed aside," she said. "Building with blocks, that's great for fine motor skills, but those are getting dusty on the shelf." and working with matthew, those are SOOOO IMPORTANT...play is so important and YES you do that at home but what about around their peers?! anyway, this is an ongoing debate in my mind about the merits of the public school system....i am probably in the MINORITY but it is just tooooooo much for these little ones....one parent states "Honestly, she's exhausted at the end of the day," Golobek said. "Kinder when I was little was more about playtime. What was kinder now seems more like pre-school and kinder is more academic. I don't know if that's a good thing or not." little on is EXHAUSTED and it is not from play!!! everything is STANDARDIZED across the board....right now, alex is doing REALLY GOOD but we do it at HIS PACE....and let me tell you, he LOVES to do "class" and sometimes wants to do it more than once a day!! but it is one on one teaching so he gets my FULL attention and in a classroom of 20 or more with usually ONE teacher and an aide?!?!?! how would he do?! but i was panicing after reading this because by the end of kinder:
The student must be able to
– Make predictions about stories and events; put in order simple stories and events
– Distinguish between different forms of text, like lists, newsletters and signs; explain the function each of these serves
– Distinguish between stories, poems and non-fiction books
– Begin to read words and simple stories, write phrases and sentences
– In math, make and use graphs; identify greater than, less than and equal to; add and subtract

WOWOWOWOWOWOWOW that is awesome....but i was panicing until i remembered that alex is still in PRE-SCHOOL NOT KINDER!!! hehehehehehe....made me nervous because i thought that that was going to be TOUGH to do but i still have a whole year and a half to get that done!!! and with alex i have NO DOUBT he can do it!! :)

man, standardized testing is just WRONG....in my opinion!!