Way To Go Katiegirl!

Auburn Fans arrive in Glendale for the big game next Tuesday.  ROLL TIDE!

Katie School Update
I received Katie's DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) report today.  Can I just say Wow!  I currently can't find her DIBELS score from August, but they were nothing close to the scores I'm going to give you tonight.  I'll break it down, so you can understand it.  This test was just taken for the month of January. 

• Initial Sounds (identifies a picture by its beginning sound by pointing to the picture or naming it.  The student says the beginning sound of a given picture) - it's recommended she know at least 25 by January.  Katie knew 40.
• Letter Naming (recognizes upper and lowercase letters out of order) - its recommended she know at least 40 by May.  Katie knew 55.
• Phoneme Segmentation (tells all the sounds heard in spoken words) - its recommended she know at least 35 by May.  Katie knew 58.
• Nonsense Words (blends sounds together that make nonsense words) - its recommened she know at least 25 by May.  Katie knew 35.

Katie has worked very hard and having to put up with me badgering her about her school work.  She did it!  Yay!  We are soooo proud of her and I couldn't show her enough of how excited I was for her.  She gets mad at me when I push her a little further.  Hopefully, now she sees that practice does make perfect.  For that, I and her daddy think she got that perfect score today.  Her daddy and I will have to do something very special for her.  We want her know that it does pay to try your best and work hard.  Mrs. M sent home her weekly parent/teacher note.  We should receive Katie's Progress Report aka Report Card on either this Friday or next Monday.  I'm so excited to see if there are any improvements.  After seeing the DIBELS report, there should be a significant changes to her literacy score.  Mrs. M has each student to write letters/notes to one another.  Katie brought home some computer made stationary for her letters to her friends.  It was cute watching her writing letters to two of her friends.  She is to turn the letters into Mrs. M in the morning.  Mrs. M will give the letters to the children that they are addressed to.  Mrs. M will be having the children do this for a while.  I think it's a great idea.  Katie had quite a bit of homework this afternoon.  Not only did she have to write her two letters, but count to 100, go over her new sight words for the month.  This month, her sight words are the names of colors (black, brown, pink, purple, etc.).  I just went over them twice tonight because she was able to fire off the names almost instantly.  I was shocked.  I thought maybe she just memorized the order, so I mixed it up.  Nope, she got them through the first run.  She read through her assigned books (approx. 5 books).  She's been reading through these for about a month, so I'm kind of hoping Mrs. M will give her the next set soon.  Mrs. M mentioned in the weekly note that they will be bringing in a little more math into their lessons.  They will be starting with addition this week.  Alright!  I've been working with Katie and adding for the past few months, but I do it in form of a story.  You know, if you have 4 apples and buy 2 more from the grocery store, how many do you have now?  Most of the time, she nails the answer.  Well, now she's going to have to get use to seeing it written down on paper.  So, this afternoon I sat with her and our little white board.  Oh my gosh!  I blew her mind when I wrote down the numbers with the "plus" symbol.  What's that? I'm sure she was thinking.  I worked with her for about 30 minutes on how to read a problem and then how you count your fingers to get the anwer.  I'm hoping it will help her for when she starts her addition at school.  Katie told me that they didn't work on math today.  Mrs. M may wait until next week since it's so late in the week.