The Jones Girls

Every Monday, Savannah has to bring something that starts with the letter they are learning about that particular week, for show and tell.  She has to give the class some clues  and they try to guess what she has in brown bag.

Today she brought a bag of baby carrots and after they guessed what she had, all the kids enjoyed eating the carrots she brought.

They all liked Savannah’s show and tell today!!

Savannah made the late bird class – yay!! She goes from 10:10am-1:30pm. This works great for me because I have more time in the morning to get the girls ready for their day plus get a little house cleaning done.

We do lots of flash cards and practice writing her name and other words. She is learning to read site words now. She knows 2 word colors by sight now – RED and GREEN. We are working on upper case and lower case letters and she knows them all by sight and sound. I have flash cards with all of our names on them and she now knows them by sight. I then have her write each of our names down, including her last name too. She is doing very well at this.

She knows all of her numbers up to 30. 1-10 by sight and most of her teens but gets a couple confused and most of her 20’s up to 30.

I ordered some books from Scholastic from her school. They had a packet of 20 books that focus on sight words so I ordered them for Savvy. We do reading every night together. She loves to read together and so do the triplets.

She has a tendency to talk without raising her hand so we are all working on teaching her to learn to raise her hand and wait her turn to speak.

They get one snack at 10:30am and she loves her cheese and crackers and orange juice.

I LOVE her teacher, Miss Tarbell. She is a wonderful Christian and is very patient and kind.

Savannah’s Kindy curriculum is high academic and we get about 1-1.5 hours of homework a night. Reading writing, sorting, grouping, coloring, cutting, pasting, and flash cards every night.

Can you imagine what it is going to be like with the triplets go to Kindy? YIKES!!  I hope they get Miss Tarbell.

Homeschooling Preschool for the triplets is going well.  The tuition was over our heads since Cliff took a 50% pay cut at the beginning of the year. I have a tutor come in for an hour on Mon and Wed. I give her the assignments and she does them along with allowing them to take breaks and play. This gives me an hour to run errands or get caught up on housework. It is only 2 hours a week, but that is all I can afford and it is a good way to begin introducing the triplets to someone else teaching them. If our finances are better in January, I will put the triplets in preschool for 2 mornings a week for 3 hours each day. I am not too worried about preschool because they just turned 3 last month. I am going to make sure they will be in PreK next year 3 days a week for sure.

The triplets know most of their colors. Maryssa knew her ABC’s by sight and sound since she was 18 mos and the other 2 have known for about 6 months. They know most of all of the shapes and know most of the primary colors. They can count to 10.

I am going to start taking all of the girls to the library once a week. The triplets are just about finished tearing up and damaging books and they understand to respect books so I think we are ready for the library. I have a pretty extensive home library since Savannah was in preschool the last 2 years before Kindy. I was able to order her books through Scholastic at Preschool so I have built up quite a library of classics and popular kids books. Over 1/3 of them are damaged from the triplets ruining them in the past couple of years so I will be replacing them this year through Scholastic.

So we are plugging along here.

Maryssa is now going to a speech therapist once a week on Fridays for an hour at Jordon Elementary School.   

It was really stressful trying to get there.   There is no parking as all of the teachers park in the parking lot and leave no room for guests or parents to park.  Really frustrating.   I have to take all3 girls out of the minivan because I can’t leave them in there by themselves as I can’t just drop Maryssa off at the front office.  So we go to the main office and sign in and get a Visitor badge.  Then I walk the triplets across the entire school to Room 9 .  It is a looooong way.  

So I am a nerve racking 5 minutes late.    The teacher tells me I have some paperwork to fill out and take me and the 2 girls outside of the class and fill it out.    Maryssa is in class with another little boy and they both receive speech therapy from the teacher.

So I am outside of the class filling out the paperwork and Miranda and Amanda are running around like little banshee monkeys.   I tell them to be quiet because the classrooms are in session and we need to be quiet.   I am quickly filling out the paperwork and I hand it to the teacher really quick and try to scram.   Maryssa saw me and started bawling…Mommy no Mommy don’t go!!   Broke my heart…

I quickly walked with the girls back to our car, buckle them in the car seats then drive over to Savannah’s kindy class and wait for her to be dismissed.   They took longer getting out.  They were supposed to get out at 11:50am but didn’t get out till almost 12pm.  I had to be back at Jordan school at 12:10pm and I was still waiting in the pick up line at 12;02pm!!   Finally Savvy gets in the car and her Kindy teacher, Mrs. Tarbell, wants to have a quick chat with me and tell me Savannah will be a late bird…Yay!!  That will make pick up and drop off much easier now…whew!!  

In the meantime I am looking at the clock…it is 12:08pm!!  Oh my gosh!!  I safely scadaddle and get to Jordan at 12:15pm and arrive at Maryssa’s class at 12:18pm.

I am met with the teacher with her arms crossed, pissed off as all hell at me and tells me this is unacceptable.  I tried to explain, but she said it can’t happen again.  Ugh…  What a terrible way for us to start Maryss’a 1st day of Speech Therapy.  I tell her I have to run because I left the girls in the car (which I didn’t want to do but I knew I was so late).   Totally sucked…

The teacher did tell me Maryssa did very well and was attentive the whole hour.  My hope is that Maryssa blows through this speech therapy and will graduate by Christmas.  She has come so far since starting private at home speech therapy last November.  She has had continuous Speech Therapy since November of Last year.

One good thing is that Savannah will be a late bird ( as long as her behavior is good and she can keep up with the more advanced Kindy students) and I won’t have a tight timeline between picking her up and picking Maryssa up.  Savannah will be going from 10:10am and I won’t have to deal with the crazy madness of the 8:30am drop off chaos.  I will be with 10 or 15 other cars and will be able to drop off Savannah right in front of her classroom – yay!!  I will pick her up at 11:30am.  This means the mornings won’t be so chaotic for me and I can breathe a little…whew!!

I just can’t stand unreliable babysitters.   Sabrina called me 2 hours before she was supposed to be here and CANCELLED.   She was supposed to babysit so I could take off to go to Savannah’s Kindy Back to School night.    I couldn’t bring any of the kids to this, it was parents only.   I tell you it is so hard to find a good and reliable babysitter.    Just a couple of weeks ago a babysitter cancelled on me 2 hours before I was supposed to be somewhere and I couldn’t bring any kids with me so I had to cancel the event.    That babysitter emailed telling me that I hurt her feelings and gave me a lame excse.  I emailed her back and just said…I am hurt too…Take Care.    Ugh…I am so disappointed in the new generation of kids growing up and how they handle responsibility.    Definitely is very concerning to me.

I couldn’t find anyone with such short notice.  So I called my very last resort, our next door neighbor Sid.  He said he would but that I needed to get back home right away.  Thank God for Sid!!

In the classroom I sat at Savannah’s desk.  She sits close to the front of class.  I check ed out her little name plate and what was inside her desk.  It was so fun to get acquainted with my litle girl’s school life!!   

On the Savannah’s desk I noticed someting…She had drawn me a portrait of herself and there was a little note that said the drawing was for me to keep as a keepsake of her fist Kindy self portrait drawing.  I teared up.   How precious…

I listened to her teacher, Mrs. Tarbell, go over the curriculum and expectations of her Kindy students and what we as parents can do to help our children do a successful job in school.

I wrote a little note and put it in Savannah’s pencil box so tomorrow morning when she opens it up she will see mommy’s special love note to her.  I drew a fish and wrote Love, Mommy and then wrote the word fish on the bottom of the fish.  It was done in orange crayon (her favorite color…like Nemo!!).

Afterwards I walked around and soaked in the whole classroom.   There are little stations for groups of kids to participate in.   A reading room which has a bunch of soft pillows, oversize stuffed animals comfy chairs – what a great little mini library for the kids.   There is a listening station with microphones and the children sit around a table and listen to the headphones and follow the reader with the books.  This will help the children learn to pace when reading.

I learned that the children will have library day every Wednesday and get to check out their own book.   Every Friday they have Music day and go to choir in the multi purpose room.

The goal that Savvy and her classmates have to reach by mid November is to count to 10 and know numbers up to 30, know upper and lower case letters by sight, sound, out of order and to be able to put the letters in order.  I have already been doing that with Savvy with flash cards so she is right on track – yay!!

The only negative that I don’t like about the school is drop off in the morning.  They want me to drop Savannah off and let her find her way to a line amongst 800 other kids and not get lost.  That scares the dickens out of her and me.  I walk her every morning to make sure she feels safe and to reassure myself she is not lost nor scared.