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lilbean05

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Posts posted by lilbean05

  1. Thanks speedmom--my husband is deployed right now (and the coach knows this too) but when he gets back in a few weeks, I am thinking we will have a meeting with the owner and the coach to get this resolved. I would just hate for the visible things to be fixed (she has her locker) but the coach to be even more resentful and continue to treat her unfairly in class.

  2. LMA--I have thought of doing that! But, in the end, I think she will end up getting in bigger trouble. I do agree with Jenn that it is a control issue.

     

    Jenn--when they publicly call her out, the coaches will say things to each other, but loudly so that it is heard, "Boy, H sure isn't behaving well. I wonder if we need to move her to preteam." or when she was supposed to be standing in line waiting her turn, instead of watching her teammate, she was watching another level practice so the coach said, "Want to watch the other team? Go ahead. Go watch them. Go sit and I will tell you when you can come back." and she had to go sit for half an hour and watch the other team and miss practice. Another girl was doing the same thing and they said to her "Want to go join H?" but didn't send her over. Just things like that.

     

    Does my daughter care? Um..not openly. I think somewhere deep in there she knows that it isn't nice and wishes she could be treated more equally, but she cares MORE about staying at the gym and being on this team and with this group of people. I talked to her about it the other day and she came to me the next morning begging to stay at this gym and not change. I do think that I care more about the locker then she does, though she does care about it too.

     

    She has until May as Level 4 and if she can't obtain a certain score at the meets, she will stay Level 4.

     

    Jenn--your final recommendation is what we are doing now--teaching her that we don't get along with everyone and that she is a great kid and to keep having fun and working hard and focusing, just riding this out. I just don't know if I am causing her harm by fighting for her or if I am supposed to just ignore it and let the coach have his power issue and act like we don't care.

  3. Hahaha! What great insight and it makes perfect sense!

     

    The coach is born and raised American and just seems to have a major issue with my daughter. She is very precocious and charming and everyone in the gym knows her and smiles and waves and it seems the other coaches find her endearing. I am not sure what he has against her, but this whole thing has really become a large source of stress for me! I really think it has become a battle of the wills.

  4. Thank you, PiCo, for your great response.

     

    This coach is the head coach for Level 4, but not the owner of the gym. He is one of the prized coaches, though, and has won many awards and everyone adores him. I have had one meeting with him already where he said that he would think of a concrete way to decide when she can get the locker back and then tell her what that would be. That was 2 months ago and nothing came out of it. I then had a follow up meeting with him last month where he was very agitated and didn't have anything to say other than my daughter needs to focus more. He still hasn't told her what she needs to do in a way that is measurable aside from "focus". (And she is, as much as a 7 year old can be and certainly compared to her peers.) I am very nice and very supportive when I speak to him, and it seems it has turned into a power struggle. I am wondering if at this point I need to talk to the owner, who is also the coaches boss, but I don't know that if that will just cause more trouble in the long run.

     

    Thank you for the response. I will probably re-read it many times as I try and sort through what to do next!

     

    I am glad I am moving too!

  5. My daughter is competing at level 4 at a very good, well known gym in Maryland. She is 7 and absolutely loves the gym, her friends, the whole thing. This past year, though, we have had a major problem with her head coach. At the beginning of the year, all the girls were in the locker room and, all of them being new to lockers, were having fun opening and closing the locker doors. When they were called out on it later and asked who was playing with the lockers, my daughter very honestly said she did while no one else fessed up. They took the locker away from her and told her she had to go to the cubby room where the rec classes put their things.

     

    Fast forward 4 months, and the coach refuses to give the locker back to her, insisting that my daughter must show that she won't goof off again. We have been trying to figure out what she needs to do to show this to him, but he refuses to tell her what she needs to do. The story is long, but in the end, my daughter works really hard to be quiet, stay focused, and do well in class but all of that aside, she gets publicly chided when she does anything that is not perfect behavior while other girls are cutting up and aren't called out for it. I have tried emailing the coach and he either responds curtly or doesn't respond at all. So, I am at a total loss for what to do. We are in the military and are moving in 1.5 years, so one idea is to just ignore it and press on since we are going to be moving away anyway. If we move her from this program we are out all the money we paid for uniforms, parent association fees (we are talking over 1k), and really her establishment with all of her friends and the place where she self identifies outside of our home. She really doesn't want to change gyms. If I keep her here, though, I am afraid it will damage her self worth/self esteem/sense of belonging. She is banned from the locker room and everyone knows it and there is no indication that the coaches are on her side at all. Sigh. Any thoughts? Golly...oh this is very stressful to me. :confused:

  6. A living book is any book that has some form of redeeming educational value that isn't a textbook. There are a lot of books out there that tell stories with kids being rude and no real plot or teaching point. There are also a lot of books that teach about so many different subjects. Check out Autumn is Here, for example. This is a book written by a current author that shows about the changing of the seasons. You can read this book to your kids, talk about the pictures, see if you can spot any of these same changes of the season where you live, etc. You can also use it outside of season just talk about preparation for hibernation, colors, seasons, etc.

     

    With young kids or inexperienced narrators, ask them to describe the pictures or tell what they think is happening. Encourage them to use complete sentences by starting the sentence for them, etc. Learning with living book is tons of fun and provides an endless opprotunity to learn things that you wouldn't ordinarily find in any text book. We are learning about the arctic now, for example, and one of my sons went to the library, poked around a bit, and learned about a short tailed weasel... ?? Who does that?! It was pretty neat.

  7. It isn't a scholastic book, but the book Home to Boston is pretty inexpensive on Amazon. It is a good kids history book that talks about a bunch of the different landmarks around Boston, so there are a variety of references to the Revolutionary War. It might be worth a shot! It is only on Kindle, but you can use a the free Kindle Cloud app to read it on your computer. Hope this helps!

  8. Yeah--we are STILL without power. Clean up is just starting on our street and traffic lights are still out all over the place. What a mess! Yesterday I had to drive around the beltway at normal rush hour to get my kids to gymnastics from where we are hiding out in VA, and there was NO ONE ON THE ROAD..no one. I think there were 4 cars on 495 as I passed Tyson's Corner. That is unheard of.

  9. It WAS scary! Sheesh. We are actually down in Fairfax now at my sister in laws, in a place with tons of overhanging power lines, but I guess they were in a small pocket of calm as the storm passed through. What a mess! We are blessed to have a refuge--I couldn't imagine trying to wait this thing out with my kiddos and no food at hand that I KNOW is safe for my PA kid. I will be happy when we are back home snugs as bugs in rugs.

  10. We were in the same storm and were able to find someone with power to stash our food. There are pockets of people with power--perhaps you know someone who has a bit of spare space in their freezer?

     

    I know Safeway just started selling dry ice, though they might be out now. I also saw on the news last night that people are starting to steal generators out of people's yards, so if your home is in an area where you think that could happen, don't drive around trying to find one.

     

    I vote find a friend, church, somewhere that does have power that will let you borrow some space.

     

    Good luck!!

  11. We are still sitting without power at our home, but fortunately we have a place we can stay to wait out the heat. The storm really freaked me out and I couldn't shake it, so I wrote about it!

     

    Here is my Derecho story--while not very scary in the long run compared to lots of other stories out there, I was a nervous wreck in the thick of it!

     

    Hope you enjoy!

     

    http://cakeinthemorn.hubpages.com/hub/Surviving-the-Derecho?done

  12. Here are some of the ones that survived "The Great Book Purge of 2012!"

     

    most Eric Carle books, The Little House (my personal favorite :001_smile: ), Harvey Potter's Balloon Farm, Corduroy, My Little Sister Ate One Hare, Berenstain Bears books (DD11's suggestion), Bentley and Egg, and Eggbert the Slightly Cracked Egg.

     

    We LOVE Corduroy---it is such a sweet story! I had forgotten about it, but I am going to go dig it out now!

  13. Thank you for posting this. I was getting a little freaked out to see all the 3 year olds in the other thread using curric I didn't use till mine were in K. :001_huh:

     

    My almost 3 year old loves to read books and play -so that is all we will be doing.

     

    I think that lots of parents get really excited to start school with their kids, and I don't blame them. It is so much fun to plan and to see your kids growing up and it is so hard to hold off. Being where we are now, though, with my bigger kids doing so well without all the early textbook stuff, I swear by reading an insane amount of books and lots of playing in the younger years. Sure we do some "school" topics when we read the books, like talking about the science things we see in the pictures, but we don't go hard core until a little bit later. It has worked out really well for us.

     

    I have heard that Oak Meadow is nice, with lots of fun reading!

     

    Rosie--thanks for all the wonderful book selections. I may or may not have had a handful of chocolate chips tonight because it has been one of those days...hehehe..I am definitely going to check out The Chocolate Cat! I second the big read alouds, too! We read Heidi aloud to my big kids when they were right around 4 and they loved it. They also totally got into Peter Pan, of all things.

     

    Thanks for all the great books! I am gunna add them to my list.

     

    And yes, the school picture is always a fun way to start out the year. The kids are excited to see who has the tallest stack, though I don't think it has quite hit them that TALLER means MORE SCHOOL! HA!

  14. My personal thought..

     

    I would stick with keeping everything rolled together, i.e. literature and history. They compliment each other so well and the two subjects I feel are best learned when taught at the same time.

     

    I also suggest keeping your 8 yo mixed in and don't hold back too much for the 10 yos. Explain to your older kids that the reason why their workload is more is because they are older and that when the 8yo is 10, she will be doing the same thing. It might be tough at first, but one of the wonderful aspects of homeschooling is the cohesiveness of family that you can create by teaching everything together, at least in most subject areas.

     

    So basically, keep doing what you are doing! It might be a rough patch with keeping everyone in synch, both mentally focused and also with levels of learning, but you will get through it and get into a good groove soon.

     

    With my kids, we all learn the same topic, with the older kids learning the topic in more detail while also having a bigger task in front of them afterwards. For example, if we are learning about food chains, the younger kids are exposed to all the information the big kids get though they are only expected to learn the basic concepts. After the lesson, the kids each have their own form of narration project coorosponding to his ability level, from writing a written narration and delivering it to creating an example of a food chain with scrap papers linked together to drawing stick figures and telling me about it. We all get together and everyone shares their task (which is essentially their narration--they have to tell about their task and what they learned) and it really keeps us all together as a family.

     

    Check out http://www.homeschoolassessment.com. There is a game there called A Walk Through the Woods that is very opened ended and serves as a good way to bring all the kids together to narrate their different subjects. We use it for term exams, though some people use it every Friday as a weekly summary of all subjects they narrate and others use it once a month to do an art study (tell about the artwork, tell about the artist, copy the art using similar techniques, create a story based on the piece of art, pretend to be in the painting and tell us what you see and where you are going, etc.) It is really fun!

     

    Hope this helps!

  15. Last year I started requiring myself to read before I go to bed, period. It didn't matter how late it was, I had to open a book and read. Sometimes it is light reading, sometimes it is VERY dense, but ever since I started doing that, I have been able to sleep much more peacefully and wake up feeling more refreshed. Most nights, I only make it about 5 minutes before starting to nod off, but even those 5 minutes make a difference.

     

    I also try really hard to exercise, even if the kids are in the room while I am bopping around to an exercise tape. Is it me time? Meh..maybe. I am often still parenting, but my body appreciates it.

     

    Adding both of these habits into my daily schedule has really helped me all around--with feeling rested, patience, overall mood, tea time...you name, it is just better.

     

    Not sure if those count as me time activities, but for ME they seem to work great!

  16. Thanks for sharing your ideas :) We just started homeschooling last year and so we haven't done preschool but one of my favorite books for little kids was The Kissing Hand - it helped my daughter who is very attached to me feel more comfortable if I had to be gone for a few hours here and there :)

     

    What a special book! Thanks for sharing!

  17. I have two kids who are well into our homeschooling years, knee deep in Horizons textbooks, CWP, FLL, WWE, Spelling Workout, Evan Moor Geography, SSLatin, and on and on...it is so much fun and comical if we stack up their books next to them and take a picture--something we do at the beginning of each school year.

     

    This year, I have another little one entering the preschool years and I am so excited. Preschool is so much fun and while I am tempted to give him some early writing and math books, his stack of books in our picture this year is going to be a bunch of library books and it is gunna be fun. I have a feeling the big kids are going to slowly eek their way into the room when we have the books spread out during the year. Fun!

     

    A bunch of different people have asked us over the years what we do for our preschool kids and I am happy to share it with you! Excited to homeschool your preschooler? Here's how we do it!

     

    What are you doing with your little ones this year? If you do a lot of reading, can you share what books you like to read? We are always looking for new books. :)

  18. My second son had a hard time with pencil grip too, doing the same thing with holding the pencil like a flute. I took a paper towel, balled it up, and stuck it in the palm of his hand. He had to hold the balled up towel with the last three fingers while doing his pencil grip. After about a week or so of this, he had it figured out and now he has great form and writing. Hope this helps!

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