How is she really doing?

The question of every parent of course.. but perhaps even more for the parent of a child that was born deaf, started hearing later in life and is now catching up..
Actually.... is Lotte really catching up..??

Homework always seems, or feels, a sort of reference for what Lotte should be able to do. There's a feeling that when a she has a problem with her homework it means that she's behind.
However.. we need to step back, think back to the last meeting we had with the school and remember that she's at above average level.
She's doing fine compared to the rest of the class.. perhaps she would be at a higher level had she not been born deaf, but that is totally irrelevant. She is exactly where she should be.. She doesn't need to be able to know everything..

With this school year there's a change in education. Like Lotte's mother said:

It's no longer "Learning to read.".. it's "Reading to learn."   !!

And that is a difficult transition. We are aware that she reads words, sentences, but she's not thinking about what she reads.. At school they work on that, learning to read & understand the title, look & understand the pictures, think about it, start reading, make metal maps etc.. But its a lot to process...

Many unknown concepts..
Like "They thought the earth was the center of the orbit of the sun."
Who is "they"..? - What is "center"? - What is "orbit"? One sentence read without problems, but not understood...

BUT... is she supposed to understand.? How many other children have problems with the same concepts?
That's something we need to keep in our mind..... we only see Lotte.... we should look at the level of other children as well.. The problems she has might be a general problem at that age in that class...

It's important for us to realise this as the last thing we want to do is push Lotte too much and making her feel as if she is failing, and thereby losing her interest in school and homework.
Because.. we are lucky with that.
Lotte loves to go to school, likes doing homework, likes reading...
A little bit of frustration at times of course but also the joy of overcoming difficulties and succeeding in difficult tasks.. You cannot have the one without the other..

So.. again we will prepare homework in the weekend, structure better when we are going to do what homework. Have the homework done before she starts visiting friends..
All promises we made before, but that dilute in the daily life where parents are sometimes not home when she is done with school.
Parents that let her play with friends instead of insisting that she comes home first, that have to choose between social activities in the street vs academic activities..
Parents that look back in history to see where Lotte comes from and are looking into the future where Lotte is headed.. Trying not to look where she is NOW.
Parents that know that it will be all right in the long run..
Parents that realise that ...

Lotte is exactly where she should be..

Update on the math

A year ago I did an update on Lotte (See here)
Reading through it again I noticed this part:

"Math is a little problematic.. The tables 1-10 go in slowly, and probably by photographic memory.. But she's not the only one in her class... There are many other children that have the same problem... Guess she doesn't have the brain for math... yet... It will come..." (Great to have this blog and go back in history.)

Nowadays she aces the multiplication tables.. A test at school with 2 pages (200 problems) of this stuff and she had 100%.. Practice makes perfect.

What's more important than 100% is the fact that she has a feeling of mastering something. Even though the practice sessions were sometimes long and tedious (mostly it was fun.), she understands the importance of it now, since she sees how much easier things have become.

They now started with division, and she has no problems with it. After all, with the multiplication tables firmly embedded in her memory, she just sees the answers.. Just like we do.

What we did for practice?

• We made cards with the question on one side, answer on the other and went through them. Wrong answer, card back in the pile..


• I also made a spreadsheet that would randomly come up with one column with addition-problems, one with substraction and one with multiplication. Sometimes we let her do this before she would be allowed to use the computer. 


• Downloaded some iPad apps that made it fun. (And needed to be done before she started listning to music or watching videos on the iPad.)


• We also bought a wooden version of the cards. Little blocks with question on one side, answer on the other. Those we used a lot after the summer and I also used them reverse: Showing the answer and Lotte giving me the question...