counting to 100

I had a conference with Melissa's teachers on Friday, and got the skinny on how she's been adjusting and where I need to work with her more. She apparently can't count past 12 according to the teachers based on the initial assessment, and she only knows the sight words "a" and "I" and can't pick individual sounds out of words at all past the beginning sound. They gave me ideas on how to work with her in these areas, like using flashcards for her numbers and sight words and having her practice writing words as they sound and stuff like that. Well, I'm using flashcards for sight words, and so far she knows 9 of the 25 I made cards for. Not bad considering we've worked with them just a couple times the last 3 days. For math, I *was* going to use M&Ms and let her eat however many she can count each day (go until she can't get any more correct in a row and then work on the next 5 numbers up together for a minute or two before letting her eat the ones she counted correctly) BUT the little turd snuck into the kitchen and ate the entire big bag of candies I had hidden (well I thought I hid them really well and out of reach LOL) So, instead I'm doing something a bit different. I went to Donna Young's website and printed off some 100 charts, the page with 2 on it. I did filled in ones and blank ones both, and handed her one of each, a pen, and a yellow highlighter. She's sitting at the table with these items, saying each number before she writes it on the blank chart and then highlighting it on the filled in one. When she gets stumped, I tell her the number and she repeats it before writing and highlighting. Its a very dry method of working on her numbers, but I'm sure that after a few weeks of doing this daily she'll be able to count and write her numbers to 100, and recognize each number in isolation. That will completely catch her up with her classmates in math, and then we'll attack the sight words harder with "rainbow writing". That is a thing they do in her class, the teacher hands each kid a page with the sight word in big letters and the kids trace it with 5+ different colors and then read it out loud as a class 5 times before writing it at the bottom of the sheet 5 times. We'll do that along with flash cards daily until she learns the sight words completely, but we'll "rainbow write" only one sight word daily. She needs to know the list of 25 plus 5 from a second list of 50 words for her final assessment to pass K.

I've determined that if I can successfully get her caught up to where she needs to be to pass the assessment in the spring, then I'll be able to tackle homeschooling her again for certain. If I can pull off this, then I can do just about anything when it comes to teaching her.

Now, somebody explain to me why Melissa is giggling nonstop and telling me that this math work I gave her is so much fun. If I were to do this assignment I'd probably be bored to tears................................. lol She just finished it and is asking for MORE schoolwork...................... I guess she likes doing lessons at home again.