The Game of Life

A few days ago I picked up a new game for us at a consignment sale for just a few dollars. I love getting new games for the kids whenever I can. I got The Game of Life. I remember playing this when I was a kid and liking it, but I was much older than Ethan and Emily. The age on the box says 9+ and I was planning on just putting it away in the closet for a while until they got older, but they begged me to play it. We set it up and I told them that they may not understand it, but we'd do it anyway. Well not only did they understand it...they LOVED it!!!! And I think that next time I will let Ethan be the banker. That kid has an uncanny ability to add and subtract money, even when it is in thousands. He just quickly does it in his head. Emily was cracking me up during the game. She chose the career path instead of college in the beginning. She ended up drawing the career card of the Artist and her salary was only $20,000. During the whole game she kept complaining, "WHY didn't I go to college!!!!!!!!" It was so funny. I just kept looking at her and saying, "Now you remember that."

I also have to talk about Emily and how she is my little homemaker. Every time I am making something, she has to be right there with me in the kitchen. She asks so many questions and wants to know why I am using this and that. She asks me about different seasonings and why I put different things in for different foods. She asks me about the purpose of baking powder, flour, eggs, etc. It is like she is desperate in her questioning. I try to be very patient and answer them all even when I am in a hurry. One day I finally took the time to sit down with her and ask her why she is asking so many questions like she is. She told me that she is worried that she won't know how to do all of this stuff when she grows up. I just gave her a hug and explained that she is only six years old and that she will learn lots of things as she grows and that she isn't expected to learn it all at one time. She said that she is worried that she doesn't know how to cook and to sew and to do all the things that I do. I told her that there are lots of things I didn't even know how to do even when I was grown up and that I am still learning. I told her that I could barely cook anything when I got married and she should ask her daddy about that and I just learned to sew after they were born. I don't know why she feels like she needs to know it all now, but I decided that I will just have her with me and let her sit with me whenever I am doing anything. Since she is reading so well, I let her do all of my recipe reading now. She is getting so good at reading recipes now and she has mastered the fractions part, like 2/3 cup of oil, 1/4 cup of water, etc. We sat down with a measuring cup and I showed her what it means and why it is divided like that. She should do really well when she gets to fractions in school. :) I just hope that she isn't quite as worried now as she was about her future homemaking skills.

The kids are getting very excited. They will be moving into their new school on Monday. They got to go over and walk through and see it yesterday and today they will actually eat in the new cafeteria. It is very big thing!!!!!! This school is very long overdue for our city. It will be nice for everything to now be in one building for security reasons as well as something simple like not having to deal with the weather. The school is supposed to be state of the art and I can't wait to see it.

Ethan has now started earning his AR points (Accelerate Reader program). He has tested on two books now and has earned 1 point. Each book is worth .5 point. Emily now has 3 points. Ethan is very excited to be doing AR now, too. I was getting frustrated with him because every time I would sit down with him to read, he would say that he couldn't do it or that he didn't want to do it. Well, I knew he could because I would watch him read things when it was convenient for him to do so (like on activity books, coloring books, etc). He finally opened up to me that he didn't want to read because he couldn't read like Emily. That just broke my heart. I had a talk with him and explained to him that just because Emily happened to be a very good reader, that didn't mean that he was a bad reader. I explained to him that he was actually reading the same as a lot of other kindergartners and even a lot better than many of them, too. He knows that I am doing the AR program with the other Kindergarten classes and so he knows that I am hearing the others read. I told him that many of the other children are just now learning to read and that he should be very proud of how he is reading. I think once he realized that not everybody is reading like Emily, it made him feel better about himself. He also really liked the idea of earning those AR points. The subject matter of the book makes all the difference, too.