Kamy – July

Kamy keeps impressing me with what she is learning.  It is so amazing to watch someone learn about their world, piece by piece, and see the light bulb go off when they understand it.

  • Kamy has always loved puzzles.  Since she was little-bitty she would sit and do her wooden puzzles over and over again.  She has a knack for them and really enjoys putting a puzzle together.  This month she took a pretty significant jump in puzzle difficulty.  Kamy’s new favorite puzzle is a scene with four ballerinas that has sixty pieces!  I wasn’t sure if she’d feel overwhelmed with how many pieces she needed to place, but she is doing awesome!  She understands how to look at each piece and figure out where it goes in relation to the overall picture.  She is even confident enough in her placement that they do not need to attach and she can align pieces on the diagonal – knowing where they are going to go when she finds the connecting piece.  I am super impressed with how she can see smaller parts of a larger picture and know how they relate.  I have a feeling she’ll be good at math!

  • Her ability to tell time has improved this month.  We are working on being able to read both an analog and a digital clock.  For the analog in her room, she can look at the hands and know which hour it is.  We also talk about what time I am coming to get her (8am or 3:45pm) and where the hands will be pointing then (short hand at the 8, long hand at the 12 or short hand past the 3, long hand at the 9).  On the rare occasion that she sleeps past 8am, she will call me out and ask why I didn’t come to get her at the right time.  =P  We have been practicing with the digital clock on the kitchen oven as well.  She knows that the “:” is the separator between the hour and minutes and is getting a lot more accurate with reading the time.  She is having a little trouble distinguishing the 2 from the 5 on the digital clock since they are mirror images, but overall she is doing great.
  • Kamy’s fine motor skills and precision have really strengthened lately.  She is capable of coloring very detailed pictures and will do a great job staying in the lines.  She is also working on learning how to write letters.  She does a fabulous job writing her name and her A no longer looks like an H.  Her Y still needs some perfecting but it is very clear what she is trying to write.  She loves working in her learning books and using the dry erase marker to practice tracing letters.  Her pencil grip is improving and she is definitely building her control.

  • Kamy is starting to show a little interest in learning how to read.  I made a comment at one point that she might know how to read when she is four, and she has been using that has her reason for why she can’t read.  We have explained to her that it’s not a magic thing that happens on her birthday but comes with time and practice.  When she IS interested, I have been working with her on some sight words.  I mostly have her pick out a common word in a book we are reading and ask her to point to the word each time she sees it (point out the word “Pooh” in “Pooh and Tigger”).  She is also figuring how to pick up clues in her learning books to “read” the directions.  The names of colors are often printed in the correct color and she understands that if the word on a coloring page starts with “y” it probably means to color the section “yellow.”  She will recognize numbers and will infer what or how many of something to do.

  • When telling Kamy not to do something, the most common response is “but I love to do ___.”  Sorry honey, just because you “love” to do something doesn’t mean you’re allowed to do it.  Nor does it change the fact that I just specifically told you not to do it.  Kamy has been pushing the boundaries a bit the month and her listener doesn’t always work.  She spent a fair amount of time in her room for not listening to us and she even lost all her books for several days after purposely tearing one apart.  At this point the discipline is over small infractions, but we are still optimistic that if we hold the line here we won’t run into nearly as many big defiance issues down the road.  Time will tell, but I am so proud of both of our children and how they behave.
  • Ironically enough, when she isn’t breaking the rules, Kamy also pretends to be the rule enforcer in our home.  She will call out Caden (or us!) when we do something that breaks a rule or requires an apology.  She’s even tried to put Caden in his room for breaking the rules!  Silly girl — you are not the boss.
  • Lastly, Kamy has been sleeping with her closet door open at night.  She isn’t always ready to go to sleep at 9pm and will often quietly amuse herself in her room for an hour or more after bedtime.  Sometimes when I walk back to my bedroom I’ll hear a little voice under her door saying “Hi” or “I love you,” long past bedtime.  She isn’t allowed to turn on her overhead light, so instead she opens the closet doors which have automatic lights so she can see what she is doing.  Kamy has a night light in her room, but it is still pretty dim.  Half the time when I go to bed I see light under her door and she’s sound asleep in her bed with her closets open.

I am so proud of the little girl that my Kamy is becoming.  She is such a sweet heart and is so full of light and laughter and love.  She makes me smile every day … even on days when I hear “Momma” a zillion times.