She's learned to add and subtract and occasionally multiply with ease. She can measure inches and centimeters and tell time on a real clock. ("Not the one with the numbers in a line, Mommy. The one with the numbers in a circle.") Math is by far her favorite subject, and her best.
She's learned to read and write well, and to use proper punctuation for the most part. She still prefers to end most sentences--and her name, for that matter--with an exclamation point "because I want you to read it with excitement, Mommy!" She still writes her letter y backwards, and still gets upset when I point it out. Perhaps because I've been pointing it out for three years. Maybe I should just let this one go.
She has completed more science experiments than I can count, most of them of her own volition, because I got tired of our science curriculum around week 10 of our school year. She's quickly on her way to figuring out how electricity works, how plants grow, why rain happens, and what happens if you leave a worm out in the sun too long. She is, in fact, determined to know everything about the world around her, and her need for answers is often exhausting. We've armed her with lots of Encyclopedias of How Stuff Works and Big Books of Knowledge to try to satiate her need to know things.
She can list all the planets in order (she's still undecided on the status of Pluto) and tell you about lots of their moons. She knows she would burn up if she went to Mercury and that she would freeze if she could land on Neptune. She's pretty impressed that our planet is situated just exactly where it needs to be in the solar system in order to avoid similar fates.
She is still her own worst critic, and she's still fiercely competitive and an extreme perfectionist. This is great when she's determined to do or learn something she's interested in, but detrimental when she fails to see a point to our lessons.
Her final assignment of our school year was a math lesson, and not an easy one at that. She was required to use an outside source (The Bible) to determine what happened on which days of creation and match the event to its corresponding ordinal number. She aced it.
When she was done, I congratulated her on being a Kindergarten graduate.
"What does a graduate do?" she wanted to know.
Well, I explained, usually graduates wear funny hats and throw them into the air.
"And do they eat Oreos?" she asked.
Of course they do.
"Let's do that, then."
So we grabbed my graduation cap and headed out to the front yard where she tossed it into the air again and again shouting, "I'm a first grader! I'm done with Kindergarten!"
And then we ate Oreos on the front porch, and talked about what a big deal this all was, and how proud I was of her for all her hard work this year.
She's growing up, this little girl of mine. Happy graduation day, Abby.
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