Tag Archives: reading

Boys, Family, Parenting

Be Thinking/Reading in French

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We are one year and two months into our first child in school.
We decided to put him into French Immersion due to our life before children living in Europe, class compositions in French Immersion and the brain/future benefit of learning another language. The only language that is offered is French, otherwise we may have preferred Spanish or perhaps even German.

As parents, we question many of our decisions that we have made for our boys. Today, we were given a small pat on the back that for our oldest French Immersion is the right track for him.

Today, we were in the car.
JC yelled out, “Seven cars. There were seven cars lined up at the light!”
I had a light bulb moment and asked, “Did you count that in your head in French or English?”
JC responded, “French of course Mama!”
My first thought was: thanks for translating to English for me and then I was surprised he was counting in French.

Here’s our Grade Oner reading his home reading tonight:
JC reading in French

Boys, Family, Parenting

Be Buying Your Teacher Shoes?

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Sunday afternoon, JC and I went to do a few errands for Nana and Papa here in the big city.

I find these one-on-one times with the boys are incredibly insightful and lead me down paths that sometimes I don’t understand.

Here is our story from Sunday:

JC and I were walking through a store looking at the Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations. We were talking about thanksgiving, then being thankful, next was school then we moved on to his teacher. We finished the conversation by trying to think of some way we could show his teacher we are thankful.

JC emphatically answered, “Shoes! Mom, we need to get her some shoes!”

In my mind I started rolling through the options – does she talk a lot about shoes, does she wear different shoes everyday (my high school VP wore a different tie every day), does she wear ‘funny’ shoes or ? I was confused.

He insisted we buy his teacher shoes, but we started talking about how much we wanted to spend or was there something we could do instead. We settled on a sweet treat and a note where I told his teacher the story of the shoes.

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I just received an email from his teacher and here was her response:

I may know why Jackson wanted to buy me shoes!! I have several single shoes at school for an up-coming lesson on selecting ‘good fit’ books. The idea of the lesson is that choosing a book is like choosing shoes to buy: they need to be the right size AND they need to fit your purpose. For example, you wouldn’t wear heels to go hiking. This is just like not choosing a story book about frogs if you want to learn about frogs. All this to say that I have many single shoes at school, and I have not yet explained why. Might he have thought that my shoes don’t have mates? Or is he insinuating that my gym runners are out of style!?!

This is hilarious! My poor organized , empathetic first born noticed all these single shoes and wanted to correct the ‘problem’ for his teacher.

Hahahaha. This made my whole month. I love creative teachers.

Book, Boys, Parenting

Be A Reader (My 100th post!)

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I am sitting by my computer gob-smacked realizing that this is my 100th post – how is that possible?

I guess my dad was right when I used to cry and moan about Math homework.  His response was often, “Just do 10 minutes per day and it will get easier!”.

Since starting this blog, I think about what I want to share with my boys as they get older, sometimes, I even think of my grandchildren.  I pray that this would be a living document for them to laugh at and maybe even ponder when they are older.

Every time I write, I think about YOU, the people who may read the post.  I am careful with my words, not being to extreme, but being honest and real in my daily life with three wee lads. (I can be a tad extreme, just ask Sexy Neck!)

Today, as I sit my six-foot frame at the keyboard, I want to write about reading.  What a gift reading is to give to our children!

Last night, I was putting baby OC to bed.  Usually, I come out from the boys’ room to screaming, running, wrestling, chasing – it is that time of day.   This is what I came out to last night:

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Without a television in our “Playhouse“, books are our go-to activity.    None of my boys are able to read out loud yet, but the reading skills are so evident: looking at books, pretending to read, retelling the story by looking at the pictures, trying to guess the words.

I am looking forward to when they can read me a book and I can fall asleep.  Much better than me falling asleep mid-book!  Yes, this parenting of boys is sometimes very tiring!