For Naomi

Good evening!
My dear friend Naomi, the only one that reads this as far as I know, has apparently missed my endless rantings about my life.  "Keep blogging", she FB'd me.  So here it is!

The first 3 weeks of school have not been overly kind to the Julian family.  Everyone, including me (especially with the new job to go to every morning), is having trouble getting back into the swing of things.  Elijah has already moved his clip to yellow (discipline measure for behavior) more times in 3 weeks than he did ALL of 1st grade.  I'm glad that he is getting out of his shell a bit.  I just wish he would do it at more appropriate times.  Joshua has 4 gifted classes (english, science, math and social studies) and deserves to.  But he has forgotten how much work is involved.  He had 2 read 2 books over the summer and do a project on each one.  They were due the 2nd week of school.  On the first day of school, his LA teacher gave him a rubric of how one of the projects (a business letter) should be formatted.  He totally forgot or blew it off or something and never formatted his letter appropriately.  So, he got a 76 on the project.  His content was well graded, but he lost all the points for format.  Just a dumb mistake.  I'm sure he won't make it again.  Then, there's Zach.......

I love Zach.  He is the funniest, sweetest, most pure and tender person I know.  He is also brilliant!  But....he hates school.  His sheer intelligence has been able to get him along this far, but now it's getting a bit harder and requires more focus and attention and he just doesn't have it to give.  (We are having him evaluated..again..for ADD or something similar.)  He came home Friday with 3 U papers: 69, 64 and 40.  Ouch!  Two were math timed tests.  He doesn't see why he should have to do 100 math problems in 5 minutes.  Frankly, I don't either.  No one will ever test you on that for a job interview, but the school wants it done so he needs to do it.  I guess we'll work on it.  The other was an order of operations quiz (parentheses first, then exponents, etc.)  That was the 40.  The funny thing is, he can tell me exactly how to do it, in what order everything should be done.  He just doesn't do it.  Or he'll do it on the first 2 problems, then do the 3rd one completely different and in the wrong order so he gets the answer wrong.  Then he'll do the 5th one correctly.  I really don't understand it.  Also, his choice card (record of his behavior and effort for the week) was more colorful than a rainbow!  Not on task after several reminders, agenda not signed, homework not turned in, trouble focusing.....the list goes on.  I am at the end of my rope on what to do to help him.  I'm really trying to take my hands off and let him deal with things.  If he can't handle 5th grade, he certainly can't handle 6th and all the responsibility that goes with that.  I'm trying to guide him, but am trying to let him do it and see if it wakes him up a bit.  I've also given a questionnaire to his current teacher and last year's teacher from his pediatrician to get a better idea of his behavior.  Hopefully that will help.

On a more positive note, Zach loves astronomy.  Last night we took his telescope outside to look for Neptune which is closest to Earth right now and easier to see.  We found what we believe to be Neptune, so he thought that was really cool.  I love him so.  I just hope I can help him.