School has started

Well, yesterday was the first day of school.

Here are the girls just before we leave the house. Erin is starting 2nd grade and Emily is in 4th. They are both very good students and are very excited about getting back to schedule.

Erin's teacher was very welcoming and warm which really made for a great start.

Emily has the new teacher who happens to male. She is very focused on the fact that he is male and was a little apperhensive about him.

I picked them up instead of them riding the bus home (upon their request) and was glad to hear that they both had a very good day. Em says that her teacher is funny but very strict. We'll see how this will work for her. I'm sure she will be fine.

Scouts also started last night. Wow are we going to have a full year. I have 12 Junior scouts and Cris has 12 Brownie scouts. We will be having lots of wild times together learning about being women in today's world.

The juniors got to pick our troop crest last night. By votes, they picked the Unicorn crest to represent us with it standing for our Friendship, our Adaptability and our Creativity.

Struggling

I am struggling with an issue concerning my youngest daughter. I don't believe my kids to be superior to anyones but I do believe both to be fairly bright and quite capable of doing very well in school. This last 3 months, Erin has be struggling with reading. She has been moving at a good pace all year but about 3 months ago she started having issues. We stepped up with helping her and did all the extra work that was asked and she is still struggling.

We just received her Iowa testing results and I can honestly say I'm in complete shock. These results, in my personal opinion, by no means resemble my daughter and her abilities. I am completely bewildered at how low they are and can't understand how she could have done this bad. She did excellant on them last year and was one of the top students in her class. This year, I haven't checked to see how she did compared to the others in her class, she is struggling with reading, spelling, writing and lanuage. Math was the only thing that she scored where I would have imagined she would have scored. Something is not right and I can't figure it out. She is excited about reading and trys reading books all the time. She can retell almost any story she reads and is very good at sounding out words, yet here we are......

We haven't said anything to her about how disappointing her scores are and we haven't had a chance to talk with her teacher. We are trying to get an appointment with her now, but haven't been able to get it set up. I can't describe the sick feeling I have over this issue. I feel like I have not been there for her or not provided something that she needed. I feel like I might be failing her.