School days

March is nearly here and the anticipation of a new baby in the family (my sister) is very near!!! I keep waiting to get a text that the day has arrived.

March also means the end of the 3rd quarter of school. I can't believe how quickly Paisley's first year of school has flown by. I know it probably won't but I continue to hope that her enthusiasm for learning continues on for many years. She truly loves learning and excels in almost every area, testing "above average" in most categories.

Jayda has made great progress the past few months in the areas she needed to work on. She is catching on to multiplication and running with it. Their teacher tests them on a website called Xtra math, and they can also practice on it as many times as they want to improve their mastery of each fact. She went from 19% up to 95 % right now and has really caught on quickly. I'm hoping that knowing her multiplication facts so well, will make division a piece of cake. I mean, it should....right? She's also been working hard on reading and as far as I'm concerned doing just great. They time how many words per minute they can read and she really stresses out about where she stands among her classmates. I don't really like that everything they do has to be timed, as it doesn't really test if they actually know the words, rather how fast they can read them. I know she gets stressed and doesn't test as well knowing she's on the clock. It only accounts for a certain portion of her reading grade, thankfully.

I'm still trying to find a series of books that interests her and makes her not want to put them down. It's probably too soon though and I'll just have to be patient and for maturity on that. I remember getting hooked on RL Stine books when I was more middle-school aged. Man, my whole class loved those books! Looking back, our mothers must have been desperate to get us to read because the content was a bit R-rated and I probably would not want my young daughter reading them!