Busy kids

I hope to resume posting on this blog this year.

I wanted to apologize to my readers for falling off the map. It’s not that I haven’t been blogging, I have, just not here. I blog a lot over at The Sprightly Writer and at The Heartful Artist though I’m a little behind on that blog.

The smart girls are doing fairly well.

My oldest is still in the advanced program at school (advanced classes in english, reading, math and social studies and science) and is now in 6th grade. She’s keeping very busy this year. In addition to her studies, she’s been involved in a lot of extracurriculars – cross country (and managed to maintain a 3.95 gpa while running every day after school in the fall), choir and show choir, newspaper and drama club (not actually acting, but behind the scenes), knitting club and she’ll be in softball again this spring. She’s had some interesting field trips. She went to go see a live performance of Wicked in Chicago with her choir class and she’ll soon be going to the Challenger Learning Center to learn about space exploration. I’m excited about that for her.

My middlest daughter, the one who was selectively mute, is very busy in her high ability (aka ‘gifted’) program again this year. She was in choir and sung in the winter concert. And she just tried out for the spring opera of La Cerentola. She wants to be a stepsister like her big sister was a couple of years back and she thought she auditioned well, so well, see how that goes. I’m so proud of how far she’s come along. She played softball in the fall and will be starting up in softball again this spring.  She’ll be doing her second science fair project and we’ll probably post it over at my science blog, The Exploration Station.

Sometimes this daughter still struggles, but mostly with intense emotions and a little bit of attention deficit.   Kind of like me.  There’s a reason I wrote my blog post Hyperfocused Yet Scatterbrained.  I’m still like that to some degree.

My youngest didn’t make it into the high ability program this year (though she tested as above average), which I think might be all right. I haven’t quite been able to figure her out. She’s smart, and imaginative, but she doesn’t like to write a lot, and balks at homework.

She was diagnosed with asthma and allergies last year, and for a while she was on Singulair which made her want to scream at the top of her lungs, so we quickly discovered that medication was bad for her (and apparently the drug comes with warnings).  Now she’s on Flovent (a mild steroid) and Zyrtec with occasional use of albuterol.

I often wonder how her allergies and asthma and medications might have affected her test scores…but I don’t know.

What I found interesting is that the middle daughter’s high ability program teacher suggested I might want to appeal to try and get youngest daughter into the program next year, but I’m not so sure it would really be a good fit.   My daughter may be able (not sure), but she’s shown she’s not exactly willing to work.  Her wrist hurts a lot when she has to write so much.  She’s not a child you can push because she dissovles into a puddle of tears.  She’s not a child that loves paperwork.  She frequently thinks she’s stupid, but I just know that’s not true.  She’s just different than her sisters.  She loves hands-on learning best.  She prefers building blocks, hands-on science exploration to writing assignments.   I think she’s more of a visual-spatial learner than an auditory sequential learner, but I’m not sure either.

She had a difficult year last year due to some mild social problems.  It wasn’t quite bullying as I don’t think it was intentional.  I think one or more of the kids just had impulse control issues and my daughter just happened to be caught in the crosshairs by accident.   She also told me frequently she hated school, and begged me to homeschool her.  I almost did, but I also wanted to see how things would be this year, in a different classroom with a different mix of kids.  She’s been doing a lot better, not hating school, though she still would love it if I homeschooled her, I think.

I decided to get a pediatric neuropsychological evaluation for her as well.  I don’t think there’s anything overtly wrong with her, but I just am not sure what kind of learner she is and I’d like to find out.

The two younger girls ALSO had a major upheaval in school…in that they had were building a new, bigger school right behind the old one, so just after winter break, they moved into the new school.  It’s beautiful and the girls seem to really love it.  At some point I should upload pictures of the old and new school because it was kind of neat.

Well, I think that’s it for now.  As I said, I think I’d like to start blogging again over here…and I’ll probably finish my series of posts I intended to on the World Conference for Gifted and Talented Children, which included meeting a fellow blogger and mother of smart kids, Jen Merrill at Laughing at Chaos.

I can’t say why I hadn’t before.  I just…I’m not sure, but I was just kind of overwhelmed with all that we were doing last semester and substitute teaching and attending to my other blogs I wanted to develop and family drama because my sister decided to elope 5 months after her divorce from husband #1 was finalize…so…things had been very odd and busy and all.

I hope this will change.  I still have things I want to talk about on this blog with regards to raising these smart girls and how I intend to guide them on, still not quite certain the best route to take all the time.

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