Arianna Update

This week we are starting our homeschool preschool again after taking the summer off. This poster shows what we are learning about this week - the letter E, counting and the number 5, the shape Octagon, the nursery rhyme "Bobby Shaftoe" and lighthouses and beacons. We'll be taking a trip down to Beavertail Lighthouse near Newport, RI later this week or this weekend as the special trip associated with this weeks theme.

Arianna knows all her letters, upper and lower case, can count items to 10 but knows all her numbers up to 16 (20 if you don't ask her to say them in order), all of her colors and most of the shapes that are covered in this curriculum - so the majority of this is more for fun than anything else. We're still working on counting but she's vastly improved.

I'm trying my best to keep learning fun even though I want to run a million miles toward reading and writing - she's just not ready and is still too young. I've invested in some 'hooked on phonics' workbooks and visited the parent/teacher store for some books on learning to write so we'll start there. She still doesn't know alot of the items pictured in some of these books, so we'll start working on that first.

Arianna has hit a big brick wall as far as speech is concerned. My husband tells me not to worry but its not going away. Arianna has developed a severe stutter - especially when asking a question or requesting something. Her EI caseworker was at the house this morning and is finally going to set up an appointment with a speech therapist because we both feel she's regressed with her speech. It's almost like her mouth is going to fast for her brain. When we tell her to slow down she'll enunciate much better (all the while pointing her finger at us in rhythm) but overall she's harder to understand. She has a very vast vocabulary and I think her language explosion has happened too fast for her. I hope its something she will soon outgrow but its affected her all summer and now I'm worried. Monday she stuttered with nearly every sentence - it's taught me alot about patience...

Weight wise she is sitting in at 24 lbs. 4 oz. She has taken, what I hope is, a temporary dive in her eating habits because we pulled her from daycare (where she would eat awesomely around the other kids) but she's also been battling several colds since we pulled her down to one day a week. Ironic she would get a cold every week she's there though...

This puts her at the 5th percentile for her actual age - this is the curve she's been on all year and I'm not going to fret about it too much. Even when she was in daycare full time and eating like a horse around the other kids she hadn't gained much weight so this must just be her personal curve. She's lanky and I'm just going to have to live with it. This is hard for me as I've battled weight issues my entire life - I'm not used to the idea of having a kid that doesn't has the same problems.

Nap time and bed time are a real struggle for us. She insists on someone holding her hand until she falls asleep. This can take anywhere between 10 - 90 minutes every night. When Daria's room is finished she is getting all new furniture and we hope to start a new bedtime/nap routine with that change... we need to - I'm not going to keep holding this girls hand when Daria starts getting into things.

Otherwise my being home full time has been a really good change for her. We can focus on potty training, which is going well again, and on her eating habits (which are more consistant again). We're now getting back into her preschool stuff and hope to start working on alot of other stuff associated with learning too.

This fall/winter promises to be challenging for me, but I'm up to the task!