Saturday morning coffee with Laura...

Welcome to my Saturday morning calm before the storm! My thoughts have been pre-occupied with details of this morning's Girl Scout cookie site sales. This is the opening morning, and I was able to get our troop three different sites in the first available time slots. That's great for selling, but also means I need to clone myself or perfect time shifting so I can juggle three sites at once. Fortunately I realized that my life could be simplified greatly by distributing cases to the supervising parents last night, rather than trying to do it this morning. I still need to touch base with them this a.m. because there's paperwork I didn't have with me yesterday, but it will take far less time than if I was also trying to count cookies to them.

Wait - I said "calm", didn't I? I'm sipping coffee, checking email, keeping an eye on Facebook in the background. Little Brother's brain is programmed to keep track of when Saturday arrives, and at around 7am I heard him launch himself out of bed and race down the hallway. I received only a quick "Morning, Mom!" as he went past me like a flash, down the stairs to the family room to begin a four hour feast of non-stop cartoons. My kids aren't big tv watchers during the week, but they make up for it on Saturdays. The upstairs remains quiet, as hubby and Big Sister are both adept at sleeping in to their hearts content.

A quick update on last week's testing:
It went alright. As the test wasn't timed, it allowed Big Sister all the time she needed to finish each section. This aspect of the test does set it aside from other standardized tests; the only "standard" being that each child that takes this test has the opportunity to actually complete all the problems. The interesting part ended up being that Big Sister placed into a far higher reading level than I'd expected. Her comprehension, vocabulary, etc. are at grade level or higher, which means it's her fluency that's really holding her back. I've spent the last few days researching how to help develop that ability in her reading. Lack of fluency generally holds back comprehension, or at the very least (in Sister's case) severely limits the rate at which the slower reader can comprehend. I am beyond pleased that she's at least broken through to the point where she can read most anything - it's just that most things take so long for her to read, she chooses not to attempt them because the task is so overwhelming. I have some ideas I want to start implementing in the next couple of weeks, and I'll blog about that later. As far as the experience of taking the PASS, it was much mellower than last year. We mailed the answer sheet back in, and should have results in about six weeks.

Little Brother has been working hard on learning his sight words. There are 20 "official" kindergarten site words, and he has 19 of them (sometimes all 20 - he's hung up on the word "said").

They are:

a, I, no, on, did
my, it, is, in, to
can, like, said, the, go
and, you, see, we, not

We've been using a combination of flashcards, word games, and reading to help him learn them. This has been a much easier process with him than it was with Big Sister. At this point with her, we were still working on the same three words, and she just couldn't figure it out. Wired in completely different ways, these two are. Brother has also been enjoying the Elephant and Piggie books, as well as the Pigeon books, by Mo Willems. The stories and pictures are hillarious, and they're full of sight words and repetition. Perfect for an early reader. He's also been working on reading Green Eggs and Ham.



Well, it's actually evening now. I took a break from this blog post to run out to site sales. I didn't anticipate just how long it would take to sign all the cookies back in at the end of our time, and then repack the remaining packages so I could make sense of what was left once I got home. The boxes, which fit so nicely in the van when I loaded them yesterday, did NOT fit so nicely after the sale today. It looked a cookie factory had exploded, and its contents were strewn within the back of my van. Frightening. But I survived my first day of site sales as Cookie Mom. I'll show up again tomorrow. And probably next weekend. And maybe for the weekend that follows. And seeing as I'm a glutton for punishment, I'll likely volunteer to do this all over again next year. What we parents won't do for our kids....