2017-18 End of Year Assessment: Little Princess

This was Little Princess's Third Grade year.

And it was a good one.

The year started off rather excitingly as she finished reading The Book of Mormon, turned 8, and was baptized.  She was so very ready to make and keep this sacred covenant.

In fact, she has done a wonderful job with keeping up her daily personal prayers, scripture study, and efforts to keep the commandments.

Little Princess is a social learner.  She wants to talk about everything, know about everything, keep tabs on everything, and be involved in everything.

She needs one-on-one time to feel loved, and as this has been an emotionally hard year with Ladybug and Rose Red, she's not gotten the time she needs and has suffered for it.  More than once this year, she's gone crying to her room saying, "I know you love me, but I don't feel it.  I just don't feel it."

That's one of the reasons we're trying to read Little Women together.  She's perfectly capable of reading the book on her own, but she needs to share it with me in order to feel connected and loved.  I've failed to find a way to make our reading consistent, but I do put aside the laundry or dishes or other chores and snuggle next to her in odd moments in order to share a chapter and help her feel that she's loved.

Academy is Little Princess's best school time because it takes place around the table with a whole group of people to talk with.  She does not love writing or drawing her narrations, but she can do them quite well; however, she loves narrating verbally.

She does it naturally all day long, with any book that catches her fancy, or any subject of interest, or any topic that matters to her.

Her favorite school subject is math.  It comes very easily to her, and she takes great satisfaction in that.  She started the school year with Math Lessons for a Living Education level 3 (such a perfect fit for my talkative girl because she often is assigned to talk out her math problems/concepts with me), finished it in a semester or so, and started on level 4 of the same series.

And it got hard.

Long division was a challenge for 8-year-old Little Princess, and she got quite discouraged at needing to ask me for help in a subject that had traditionally been easy for her.

Never mind the fact that she was working her way through more than a year's worth of math in less than a year!

(The real problem is that she likes to work out the problems in her head instead of writing them out, and long division demands writing out.)

She's an emotional kid, and during the second semester of the school year we had to put math away quite frequently in order for her to get her perspective back, and I made her put the book away for the summer unfinished so that her brain could rest, her cognitive skills could develop in peace, and she could come back ready to face the challenges with a fresh mind.

Suffice to say, she made a lot of math progress this past year.

Little Princess likes to do things quickly, including writing.  This means her handwriting gets very sloppy, so I assigned her to work through as much of  Italics: Beautiful Handwriting for Children by Penny Gardner as she could.  She hated it.  But she would have hated any handwriting program, and this one was a good fit, because she could do just one line a day, and that was enough.  There are lots of pages left, and lots of practice still to do to keep her handwriting legible, so she'll pick this book back up in the coming year.

Her love of reading comes and goes in fits and spurts.  Sometimes I can hardly get her nose out of a book, and sometimes I can hardly get her to pick one up at all.  She's drawn to emotional and simple series about animal rescues and magical mermaids.  I haven't despaired though because she has read gorgeous classic such as Heidi and A Little Princess on her own, and we're slowly reading Little Women together.

I tried to give her a custom literature study experience using The Lesson Book and Pollyanna by Anna Sewell.  It was a monumental failure.  I stuck it out for 20-ish chapters (10 lessons) before admitting defeat.

She is a fan of our evening reading and our new audiobook tradition while we're driving around town. She gets plenty of quality literature.

And she discovered Jessica Day George novels (the ones geared toward younger readers).  They're simple reads, but they are definitely a step up from magical mermaids.

Creative writing is another fit and spurt experience with Little Princess.  Sometimes she begs for computer time so she can write long stories.  Other times she cries if I ask her to respond to a writing prompt.  

I have not asked her to do any expository writing other than Academy narrations.

She completed a funny, old-fashioned grammar book by M.L. Nesbitt called Grammar-Land.  It was very fun and quite challenging by the end.

She also loved a Charlotte Mason-inspired spelling program called Schoolhouse Spelling that I found on SchoolhouseTeachers.com last year before our review membership expired.  I was supposed to print and bind the next level for her, but I never did, and then we tried the Pollyanna literature study that included spelling, and then we dropped spelling altogether.  In talking to Little Princess about it just now, it is clear that she wants spelling lessons again.  "I liked doing spelling!" she says.

This year Little Princess fell in love with Mandarin Chinese.  We borrowed an Usborne First 100 Words book from the library, then a First 1000 Words (both internet linked), and she was hooked.  When it became clear that this was no passing fancy and I would need to find resources to help her actually learn the language, I researched whether she should start with simplified or traditional characters.  I could find no conclusive evidence for either plan being superior to the other, so we stuck with the simplified characters she'd already been learning via the Usborne books.  We've received a bit of flak for this from people who learn this is the road of study we're taking, but I think that either road will be a blessing.

She also asked me to find her a geography resource, and I had a freebie download saved in the computer from some site or another.  I printed and bound it, and she dove into unit 1, completing it in just moments.  Unit 2 proved to be more of a challenge, and we had to do internet research to complete the assignments.  Because geography was supposed to be an independent course of study for her, and it was not, it fell by the wayside.

Dancing and singing are not major passions, but they are an important part of Little Princess's life because of our dance group.  She easily learns what she needs to, and she sets a good example for the other members of the group.

Little Princess likes technology.  If it has a screen, she must touch it.  It is a challenge to keep our no-tech-before-ten rule given her passion for such items and her totally reasonable requests to take and edit pictures, learn a foreign language, write stories, or place library holds.

A couple of pictures taken and edited by Little Princess this year.

She likes to be in charge.  Her place as child #6 makes this desire both a blessing and a curse.  She can be incredibly responsible, but she can also be too bossy.  We're working on seeking a balance.  She does most of her chores without being reminded--especially the ones that involve animal care instead of cleaning indoors.

Overall, she's a bright and shiny kid who loves the Lord, loves her family, loves life, and loves learning.