Development Update after one month n a half school entry

My daughter came home yesterday (friday) from school with these.....

a crown

( a scanned picture coz our digital camera is broken)

The same crown as above ..scanned in a different way...

She was given a crown because......

" For your systematic work, i congratulate you my hatice.

For not making me sad and for working hard, i thank you my child."

Your teacher

Next to the crown, she was also presented with this certificate...

This was given to hatice by her English Teacher

My only assumption is.... she has been a good girl after all :0) Aferin sana!

What has she been up to these days? Well... academically, i think for this semester, the focus of education is more on the kids learning to read and write. The school is applying the *cursive* writing style for the first grade... what is the cursive handwriting style??

"Cursive is any style of handwriting which is designed for writing down notes and letters by hand. In the Latin and Cyrillic languages the letters in a word are connected, making a word one single complex stroke. In British English, the phrase "joined-up writing" is far more commonly used, while the term "running writing" is sometimes used in Australia. Cursive is considered distinct from the so-called "printing" or "block letter" style of handwriting, in which the letters of a word are unconnected, and from "print-writing", which is a cross between cursive and printing, with some unconnected letters and some connected. In the Hebrew cursive and Roman cursive, the letters are not connected."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive

Basically, these r what hatice will be using in her school work... these r the sheets given to me by her class teacher to help her with the writing skills using the cursive style...

So far... Hatice has learnt the letters... a, e, i, l, t and n. It is quite painstakingly torturous to do homework with these letters...but hey! what can i do eh?

What i notice is that the teacher is using the phonic sound to represent a letter and those phonic sounds r combined to form a sentence. I personally think that it is a good idea. When i was learning to read in Malaysia, ours was more of a music system... a is a n not *a* in the phonic sound. It was not needed in Malaysia since we do not have the letters ç,ş,ü,ğ,ö, etc as part of our alphabet letters....

How is hatice doing? Well.... frankly speaking... i think she is doing ok...she still tend to mix up the phonic sounds of a and e... she still need help to actually remember the phonic sound i. she may be a bit slow in her reading, but in time and with a little bit of help.. i think she will make it.

She does drive me crazy though. The thing with hatice is SHE CANNOT BE UNDER PRESSURE. Once she is in pressure, she tends to falter. Let me illustrate, let say we r reading the word *anne*. Like i said, she sometimes got mixxed up between the phonic sound *a* and *e*. She may read, *anna* instead of *anne*. When i said, hatice, look carefully at the letters...remember the sounds. She will start getting panic and may come out with another word totally! So, indeed, NO RAİSED VOİCE at all in teaching her..though it is proving very hard to do..... But i am confident she will do just fine :0)

Another matter is on reading.... let say the word *atlet*... she may read the word by diving it into 2 syllable.s.. *at* and *let*... she can read the syllables correctly, but when it comes to matching the 2 syllables, her mind tries to find words that she knows with the first syllable sound that she may end up saying *atla*!! ..i mean imagine... she was reading *at* ...*let* and in the end she ended up saying *atla!*... i keep saying to her (trying not to raise my voice which ifind really difficult esp at the end of a tiring day) not to *made up* words in her mind...concentrate on what she is reading... argh!... but deep down, i know... patience is a virtue... i shall not give up on my daughter... she may be a bit slow but she is one very very hardworking girl (just like me hhehehe perasannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn)... she will always have my support one way or another... :0)

Here are some of her homework she had done all these while... her writing speed is faster these days as well... this weekend, i suppose i will have to upöoad on her spelling skills (ie..i read a word and she writes)... we will see...wish me luck!

Among the earliest work


*e* is for *eşek*

early stage of cursive style of*e*

4 ekim...thatz my birthdate by the way :0)

*el*... means *hands* in english

This is actually one word she never get confused of..dunno why..

In our effort for her to learn to write her own name... now she can! see how she got better towards the end of this writing exercise?

*a* for *at*

Her handwiriting.. not bad eh? i cant even write like that! hahaha

My dear daughter... i wish u all the best. I cant wait for u to be able to read properly. All my love to u!