And later on Saturday

Julia is in the living room with headphones on listening to her therapy music, making blue and pink dinosaurs with palm trees out of new play dough. She started a new session of swimming classes and we re-started our home work tonight. And I have questions.

The first about swimming. Julia has done the same class, polliwogs, three times now. She is incredibly able in the water and she can do all of what is expected to pass on to the next class. However, she does not follow directions. So, she will not do what she is told when she is told. She can kick to the other end of the pool but would rather not do it when the class does. My original plan, which might be incredibly naive, was to have her repeat the first class until she was able to attend to what the teacher was saying and listen. I have no investment in her moving ahead, but I am now wondering if I should be burdening the beginner teachers with her behavior, as if they are going to change it? My expectations are confused.

My confusion arises right now because she has a new teacher. Previously, she had had the same guy, Allen, and he was getting somewhere with her. He also knew how to handle her. Julia's new teacher, Linda, is a SN teacher but . . . . I just don't know, my gut tells me nothing, and I am not sure of who to ask. This question also feeds into a more general question about activities and Julia. There is a young kids choir at the church. Can I impose on the director and see if she can join?

Before dinner, Julia and I started our home work again. We did letter work during out vacation, but for the week afterwards and for this past first week of school, I did not demand that we sit down and work. We did a bit of alphabet saying and signing, and some informal spelling, but that was it. Yesterday, we sat down and worked on her name and some coloring. I thought we would ease into working.

I decided to try to work on simple words following the starfall.com process. She still needs reinforcement with letters and sounds, but I am hoping that the letter work will come using words. She wrote her name; she worked on "a", "t", and then "at". This was pretty unconcrete and she gave me some resistance. We read the little book, "Zac the Rat." (fascinating reading!) We went to the computer and did the "AT" exercises and the "AN" exercises, and then, did two work sheets that had pictures next to half written words. In the first sheet, she had to fill in the first letter of the word and trace the remaining two letters, the second sheet, she had to fill in the "a" for each word. Julia worked diligently with a lot of help from me to keep her focused and moving along.

I have 6 sheets that work on short "a". I plan to run through the set twice at least to see if she gets it. At the same time, we will continue to read Zac the Rat every day and sometimes at bedtime.

Once again, no idea of what I am doing, but feeling my way to the next step.

Another note, at one point when we were working, Julia started saying that she was scared of the letters, that the work was too hard and that it scared her. I put her in my lap and we hugged eachother to get the scareds out. Then she went back to work.

Oh, if I could only get inside her head!! Now, to take a picture of her dinos and palm trees.