100 Days of School

(Photo credit: Tori)

Yesterday marked the 100th day of school for Zahra. (She was absent one day, so technically it was 99, but who's counting?) All over Golden View, students were doing various projects to commemorate this milestone. In Zahra's classroom, while I was volunteering from 8 to 9:00, the students worked in small groups on a Fruit Loops project. They had charts with 100 squares and they each counted 10 Fruit Loops of one color for one line, then 10 more of another color, on and on down the rows until they had 100 little colored circles lined up on their chart. When they were finished, they put them into a little plastic baggie and later in the day they made necklaces out of them. Zahra promptly consumed her necklace right after school let out. She shared some of it with Max, too.

So I thought I would take this opportunity to share some of the progress Zahra has made in 100 remarkable days. She has learned so much in these last few months!

Zahra entered kindergarten with some very basic skills that she had acquired in preschool. She knew a select few letters from her alphabet, barely knew how to write her name, and was nowhere near literate.

Now Zahra can read short words and complete sentences! The school sends home little readers for kids to practice and when your child reads the text well, it's sent back to school and another one comes home. Recently one of her favorites had a few sentences underneath pictures on 4 pages. The sentences read like this: "Go, Nan! Nan ran, ran ran. / Go, Pat. Pat ran, ran, ran. / Go, Van. Van ran, ran, ran. / Go, Cat! Cat sat, sat, sat." On the last page, the cat was sitting idly, having no intention to run in the race like the other characters. Every time Zahra would read it and get to the last page, she would tell me, "The cat doesn't listen. He doesn't want to run. He just sits there!" (I thought it was so cute how she wanted to explain what was going on every time.)

I think, thanks in large part to the Houghton Mifflin program called Alpha Friends and Mrs. Conton's repetition, Zahra quickly learned every letter and the sound that it makes. (Each letter has a corresponding character and picture, complete with a description of sound. Like "Keely Kangaroo says k..k..k.., Larry Lion says l..l..l.., Mimi Mouse says m..m..m..") She knows them in any order you point to them and her handwriting is continuing to improve.

Zahra can clearly write her first name now (instead of a Z-scribble-scribble) and is working on writing her last name (no easy task since it has 10 letters!). She has a little reminder card in class to help her spell it correctly.

She can also clearly identify and expand upon patterns. For example, if you put a red block, then two blue blocks, and another red block in a row, she can easily add to the pattern by putting more blue blocks down. For homework, she sometimes has to create her own patterns and they have been somewhat complex (not just two repeating colors or shapes, but multiples and singles mixed together).

I was also surprised to read in her report card from last term that she knew the day and month of her birthday. It wasn't anything we had worked on at home and I was just kind of surprised when I read that. I almost didn't believe it so I quizzed her. "Zahra, when's your birthday?" to which she quickly replied, "February twelfth." Wow. Cool.

I'm sure there are tons of other things that Zahra has learned and I will definitely know more after her next report card comes home. These are just some of the concrete things that I have seen myself, both inside the classroom and at home.

I'm so proud of my kindergartener! I hope she continues to love school and wants to continue learning new things for the rest of her life.