Loving em’ One At A Time

Before I became a full time Mommy I was a full time teacher. Over 9 years I had the great joy of teaching 4th grade, 2nd grade, and then my last year of teaching I took my 2nd graders for another THRILL ride and we tackled 3rd grade together:)

The first 6 weeks of school, a teacher always has the daunting task of figuring out her students one by one. What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? What makes them tick? What is their learning style? Usually by the end of the 3rd week a school, a teacher has grouped her students by ability and learning style. Although I could write a book on this topic, I will keep it short and simple. The bottom line is I know and understand how very important it is to teach on a child’s individual learning level and individually as much as possible! Over 9 years of teaching, I saw many students soar when given just a few minutes of one on one instruction!

And today, I was given that JOY again. Any teacher will tell you, there is nothing more joyful than experiencing that “light bulb moment” in a child.

My children are almost 4, 3 and 2. I will admit most of my instruction to them is “group instruction” Most everything we do, we do together. I have had difficulty at times getting one or the other to cooperate and concentrate while I am trying to teach them something.

Well today, the 2 youngest children were napping. Zachariah had already taken a “cat nap” and was resting in his room when I decided this would be a great opportunity to work with him. He had a letter “V” project that we needed to finish. So I called him out of his room and we went downstairs, just the two of us to work on Letter V. He has never cooperated so well. First, we pretended that Letter V was a road for his cars, then he glued pasta noodles back to back on his V. Normally, he would have given me great resistance to this task. But without the siblings around, he loved the project!

Then came the light bulb moment! I had been working with him on sequencing for many weeks, it has never clicked, or at least I thought it had never clicked. After we finished the letter V, he ask if we could do “his letter” which is letter Z. So I thought I’d try to get him to sequence the colors and he did it! I would ask him after every noodle what color comes next and he got it right time after time! I was so proud of him!

So I must find a way to give each of my Triple Smiles individual learning time. If any of you moms out there have any tips on this topic, please please forward them to me!

And just for fun after supper, we pretended Zach was a Veterinarian and then he shopped at a Vegetable Market!

“Vegetable Stand OPEN”