Kindergarten registration is in about 4 weeks already! I can't believe it. Our local school district has started posting notices in the newspapers and at the local daycare centers that it's coming up. Daycare is going to be doing parent-teacher conferences, and apparently will be giving us information that we may need to pass along to her Kindergarten teacher. Will she know coming out who her teacher is going to be? Will parents get to actually meet the teacher, and let them know a little bit about our child? I'd sure like to. I know, for instance, that her teacher's job will be much easier, knowing ahead of time that Kaylen will try to run that entire classroom, and get away with anything and everything! :) Oh boy - how do teachers do it?!
Today one of the assistant teachers in Kaylen's classroom told me Kaylen had a few rough spots in her day. You see, Kaylen was having a hard time listening and obeying today. She did lay down nicely, and the reward for that (if you don't fall asleep) is that you get to go to the big kids' classroom until the kids that aren't worried about missing something and fall asleep, wake up. Well, apparently she was too wild and acting like a mean dog, even after one of the teachers asked her to stop. So, she got sent back to her classroom, and proceeded to throw a fit. She tends to do that when she doesn't get what she wants. Then later in the afternoon she was jumping off the couch and off the stairs, and when she got sent to time-out, she threw another fit. When do the screaming fits end? I thought that would be over by now. We're working on that now - this evening she got sent to timeout once, and we made a point to quickly tell her that if she proceeds to throw a fit on her way and during time-out she will have more consequences than just a time-out. Any other suggestions?
She's so ready for school, though. Every day she amazes me by how much she knows, what she can do, what she's learned! This evening, she "read" a whole book. We mostly just listened while we were fixing dinner, as she does much better when we're not listening. She gets real nervous and worried that she's saying the wrong words, and we just wanted to let her give it a try herself. I'm not sure anyone listening (including us), would even have had a clue what she was talking about, but she got a few words that we had no clue she knew how to read. We asked her to spell a few words for us, and she had them right! Who knew?! I think it gave her a little confidence that she "read" the whole book by herself. Usually when we ask her to read to us, she declines, so hopefully this encouraged her to want to try it more often.
Anyway, I can't believe she's almost 5 already. And she'll be starting Kindergarten in mid-August. Yep, I think it may be the earliest school start date in the history of schools - although that does mean they're usually out by Memorial Day. Yikes - a school-age kid so soon! She's lived with us almost two years now. How did she grow up so fast?!
7 comments:
Our school year kept starting earlier and earlier. It was Aug 4 and scheduled for Aug 2 for the next year when they finally passed a law in FL that it had to start within 15 days of Sept. 1. Whew. Good thing. It'd probably be starting July 29 by next year!
We deal with fit throwing with Jasmine too. She'll be 7 in Feb. At first she couldn't think of consequences past the moment so it did no good to say she couldn't do something the next day. But now we tell her if she throws a fit about going to bed, she'll go to bed an hour earlier the next night and if it's gymnastics or GA's, too bad! If she throws a fit about getting ready in the morning she misses her half hour of Disney channel after school. It helps some.
Your little girl sounds extremely intellegent and maybe she is just bored. Ask her teachers to give her some "busy" work during naptime. Do you think she needs a nap? Anyway, It's hard to see your "baby" finally make it to school age...Terry<><
Wow, Kathy - Aug 2nd?! That's just way too early! It's insane. Iowa has laws against it being too early too, but districts can get exceptions if they have building projects, which ours does.
Terry - Yes, I've thought of the possibility that she's bored. She's always had problems falling asleep - it takes her a long time to calm down. She doesn't need a nap every day, but she gets real cranky by the end of the week, and generally sleeps about 45 minutes at least one day on the weekend. We've told her that she doesn't have to sleep, and her teachers know that many kids won't, so after they've rested for a bit if they're not asleep they can get up and go to another room to play.
I like the busy work idea. We have conferences with the main teacher in her classroom in a couple weeks, so maybe I'll see what she thinks about that. Kaylen's told us that a few other kids don't have to lay down at naptime, so maybe this could be an option for her.
aww your baby is growing up!! are you gonna cry when she goes to her first day of school?? do you need moral sister support?? hehe
its hard to believe that she's going to be 5 already it seems like she just moved in with you guys yesterday
Naw - I'm not really the crying-when-my-daughter-goes-to-school type, but we'll see... :)
Maybe just taking tons of pictures.
I read a column in a newspaper on this topic by John Rosemond. I don't know how severe her tantrum was (and she is still a little girl), so this might be overkill but it might also work if you continue to have problems. He suggested telling the child that if a parent gets called because of a trantrum, then that parent will be taking off of work to pick that child up from school. The child would then spend the remaining time when they should have been in school in time out in their room at home. (Minus any fun toys, etc..) Now, that is of course a bit over the top here and you may have some concerns about the whole time out situation but there might be something you can tweak in that to let her know how really serious you are if things get worse. (Waiting to give a consequence until later in the evening is hard because it doesn't connect the action and the consequence as clearly, like Kathy said.) Having Mom and Dad instantly respond is an immediate thing.
You might also try to see if the teacher would provide her with some type of "counting device" so that she could keep track of how long she has to "rest" before she can do something else. If she could see an end to the nap time she might tolerate it better. (Egg timers, watching a clock on the wall, making a small chart with post it notes for every 5 minutes of nap time and being able to remove a post it every five minutes, etc..)
Kayla
Kayla - I like your watching the clock idea. We have in the past gotten out a timer. There were times when she wouldn't stay in time-out, or would throw a fit, and it worked to restart the timer when she did something like that - she really understood that.
Her fits aren't very big anymore - she used to go on and on throwing tantrums nonstop for an hour or two, but she's beyond that - she usually realizes after a few minutes that it's not helping her cause.
The ones at daycare we don't usually hear about until we get there to pick her up, so they must not be too bad. They have called us once or twice, and Jock talked to her on the phone. When she realized they really were calling us and she had to answer to us what the problem was, she just started crying and saying she was sorry and shaped up fairly quickly.
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