Bounciness

I think the thing that makes my days rough is the massive volume of movement JT can produce. I was never the kind of person who needed to tap my toes and twiddle my fingers. When I was really young, I chewed my hair and nails, but that was the extent of my nervous habits. This kid CAN NOT stop moving! The exercise ball does little to alleviate the problem. I send him outside to run around. I allow him to sit on the floor, lay on the floor, sit on his desk. If he's concentrating on reading a book he's really into, he stops moving. That is the only exception. If I could, I'd have him read all day! I just hope he grows out of this before his teen years, or I'll need new furniture every week.

With the holiday, we've had kind of a slow two weeks. Wednesday we put in almost a full school day and I felt like we had accomplished quite a bit. Today we had the morning in the classroom and then a friend of JT's that also cyber schools came over to play games. That was a nice break for all of us. The moms were able to visit and the kids got to play. I need to work a few more sanity savers like that into our schedule.

I'm hoping to get a full day in tomorrow. It's still difficult to get him to want to work on composition assignments. I haven't found any tricky ways to convince him it's fun. At bedtime last night we had a funny conversation. He was reading a non-fiction book about a bird rescue shelter. When he finished it he said, "I hate it when I come to the end of books like that one". I told him there are plenty of other non-fiction books at our library. "Plus," I said, "there are people writing more every day, maybe you could even write one". He said, "I'd love to write a report on fungus farms". Isn't that what every 7-year old would love to do?! This idea came because on Thanksgiving while channel surfing at my parent's home (we don't have tv, so it's always funny when the kids get access to it) he made my husband stop on the History channel. There was a show about fungus and mold. He bypassed all the cartoon channels, etc to stop on fungus and mold. Then he was irritated that everyone was talking and he couldn't hear what was being said on the show. We sent him alone to another room and he watched the whole program. Come to think of it, he sat perfectly still through the entire thing! If only I can find enough material to engage him at that level we might have peace in the classroom.