Supporting Academic Work

So this is a new experience for me, supporting Natalie's academic work. She came home on the second day of school having practiced writing her name! I flipped out (silently and internally, of course). She also had made a "sound book" with her teacher for the letters N and M. I called the school first to see if I should be reinforcing this stuff at home or if I should stay out of it -- I've never had to coordinate with a school before -- and they said go ahead. So I got out our LMNOP wall cards (definitely worth buying, I can't emphasize this enough. In fact, skip the alphabet book and get the cards, they are more versatile) and put the ones for N and M up on her wall. For those of you working out your own alphabet, in their list N is Net and M is Mountain. On the cover of Putting the Heart Back into Teaching: A Manual for Junior Primary Teachers by Maher and Bleach, they show N as a needle, which I also really like.

I've recently begun reading Reading Children's Drawings: The Person, House and Tree Motifs by Audrey McAllen and found a new test for whether your child is ready for academic work. She goes into great detail about how physiological processes are revealed in children's drawings and paintings. A word of warning: in order to apply these "tests" to your child and try to analyze the results, you must also have The Extra Lesson: Movement, Drawing and Painting Exercises to Help Children with Difficulties in Writing, Reading and Arithmetic, also by McAllen, as a specific series of movements must be done before the child is asked to "Draw a person, a house, and a tree, adding anything else you'd like." This procedure is also done as a spot check later on when there are concerns that the child might need remedial work (the extra lesson) and, if so, where it should be focused.

The siblings are having a hard time adjusting to Natalie being gone. She was the Queen Bee, the center of their universe. Our family solar system is undergoing readjustment. :-) I know that it will all sort itself out however, and I'm really enjoying our time & getting to know them better.