Silly Sentences, originally uploaded by cheryl.
Homework. It's the bane of our existence sometimes. Connor hates it. HATES it. He apparently is over his fascination with big kid school. He complains every single day about going to school. He really complains when we have to do homework after he's already been at school all day long.
Kindergarten is pretty hard core these days. I remember nap time and play time, and it doesn't really sound like Connor gets much (if any) of that in his day. The poor kid is being asked to learn Chinese, for goodness sake.
And he's also expected to read by the end of the school year.
Most of his homework focuses on that. A large part of it is sight words - flash cards of sorts that help him learn to recognize words on sight (rather than sounding them out). He has about 50 words we're working with (five new ones come home every week). He knows most - between 35 and 40 depending on the day. He struggles with a few that look similar, or have similar endings. But overall, he does pretty well.
Except when he's tired. And then he just starts naming any word he can think of, regardless of whether it has any of the same letters in it as the one you're showing him. Today he told me "do" for "but," because clearly those are similar. But there was a pattern, and the pattern was he was done. We'd worked on them for about 30 minutes, and he was simply tired.
So we took a break, or so he thought. We got out the new game that Uncle Brian and Cousins Austin and Kyndal got him for Christmas over the weekend. It's called Silly Sentences. It's basically sight words. Despite that fact, he was enthused. We played for an hour. We even had to leave the finished ones on his desk "to study later" or so I was told.
"A ball ate a green banana."
"A thin hero jumped on a squirrel."
Silly. But sentences. And using sight words, capital letters, and punctuation. He had fun, and he had no idea he was still doing his homework.