Okay, so I know that I have been remiss. It has been a couple of months since I have posted anything, but I do have a great excuse. I started a new job that is just wearing me out completely at night. This is actually the first weekend where I haven't felt like I needed to sleep the whole weekend just to feel human, so progress is being made. I hope you all can forgive me, and I do promise to try to do better.
As a single mom, one of my major goals is making sure my children get a quality education. My son is in 4th grade and he struggles with pretty much all subjects. One of his major problems is that he is afraid to try something new. I think he may be afraid of failure. If he cannot get it right the 1st time, he doesn't want to do it. If he actually tries the new harder work, and starts succeeding, he starts getting cocky and chooses not to pay attention. I recently found a couple of websites that are fantastic. Unfortunately they are not free sites, but they are fantastic non-the-less. These are sites that I do not have any issues with paying because they are just that fantastic. Each site has pros and cons. The first site is called Adaptedminds.com. The other site is called ixl.com. These sites are not worksheet sites. These are sites where the student can work on problems until they have mastered the subject mater. I have been looking for these kinds of sites for years. I do feel that had I known about these sites 4 years ago, my son would not be struggling like he is. Now, back to the Pros and Cons. Adapted Minds is wonderful but it only has work available for 1st grade to 5th grade. They charge $9.95 each for both math and language arts. Ixl has math work available for pre-k to high school. Their downfall is that the language arts part only has work available for 2nd - 4th grade. Ixl charges $9.95 for the math and an additional $2 for each child. But on the other hand they only charged me an additional 6.95 for the language arts portion. Both sites have "rewards" available for the kids to see their progress. My children, especially my daughter, really gets a kick out of earning a new star. That is a huge motivator for her to do work as much as anything else.
Now that I have discussed my son's school issues, it's time to discuss my daughter's issues. She has just started Kindergarten this year. She has picked up most of the Kindergarten work already, but one thing that I have recently noticed is that she is struggling on recognizing her color words. I searched the internet to see if there was anything available that might help, but I couldn't find anything, so since I am an author wannabe, I decided to make her some books to read that focuses on recognizing the colors and also working on some of her site words. I have decided to make a new book for her to read each week that focuses on the different colors. This week we did the color pink. She is doing really good already reading it. My original plan was to print the book in black and white then color the pages my self, but then I realized, "ain't no one got time for that." HAHA. kidding of course, kinda. I decided to color the pictures in paint. Now while my color job isn't the best, mostly because I didn't want to take the time to make the pictures perfect. I kind of like the imperfections in the pictures. I will probably go back later and fix them, but as of right now, I'm okay with how they look. I found coloring pages on the internet to use inside my book, so I want to make it perfectly clear that I did not illustrate the book, I only wrote it.
I would like to share the book with others, but I cannot figure out how to attach it. If anyone has any ideas please let me know.
