Insights into Alex

The Friday after school was out I started the math curriculum. I know, I'm a mean mom. ;)

We watched the video first and I had all of the kids sit down to watch it. They don't get to watch much TV so they thought it was a treat. LOL Alex wanted nothing to do with it, but I told him he could either watch it now or later by himself and he opted to watch with the rest of us. It was really funny watching Tim raise his hand to answer questions to the man on the video. At least I know he learned something in kindergarten! Alex, too, began to participate in calling out answers at times.

After the video, the three youngest wanted to play with the manipulatives while Alex chose to go outside to play. I let the three littles play with the blocks and just build and have fun. When they were done they went outside to play. As soon as I had put them away Alex came in and asked to "play with the same thing Tim and Danielle were playing with". And it clicked.

He's embarrassed.

He's embarrassed because he thinks he can't do math and he doesn't want to look stupid in front of his siblings. I got out the manipulatives for him and let him play a little bit while we talked about them, but we didn't do any actual "work".

I didn't have the kids do any work over the weekend (see?? I am a nice mom!) but started in again on Monday (Memorial Day). Mark had to work so it was just a day at home for the rest of us. I sat down one-on-one with Alex and we started doing the Math-U-See worksheets. As we worked through some counting and place value, I noticed a few things.

One, Alex was slowing down and actually counting. He's very bad about skimming over things and counting 6 when there are really 5 or 7 when there are really 9.

Two, he got excited. At one point he told me "Mama, I can do this! I'm smart!"

Which is what we've known all along. Now if we can just really convince him of that so that he believes it!