Good Job Kenzie!

I love this little girl. She works really hard in her reading, which doesn't come easily for her. In her class at school, they had a carnival. If you read 400 minutes, you got to go to the movie. For every 100 minutes more that you read, you earned a carnival ticket to be used after the movie. If you read 1000 minutes you got to do all the activities. If you read 1500 minutes, you get to have lunch with the principal. Mackenzie's original goal was to just get to 400 minutes. We had a month to do this. Now you may be saying that 400minutes is pretty easy to obtain in a month but for Kenzie, it was going to be hard. She can read, she just doesn't have confidence in herself and so she gets really self conscious when she messes up. She knows her sight words really well but just doesn't read smoothly. It is very choppy and slow. So, when we practice her reading after school, it is quite the ordeal.

So, we started to journey. We decided to try and read at least 45 minutes a day. We picked out fun books from the library and began. By the time Spring Break ended we were very close to her reading goal already. Near the end of the month, she was already at 800 minutes. So, with just a short amount of time left, Mackenzie decided that she wanted to try and make it to 1500 minutes so she could have lunch with her principal. She would come home from school and read for a whole hour. It was hard but she wanted to make it. The only problem was, I was equating 60 minutes to equaling 100 minutes and completely miscalculated how much she would need to read those last few days to equal 1500 minutes. By the time the day before the carnival came. Kenzie was at 1275 minutes. I looked at all her times and thought, "That just doesn't add up with my calculations." I wondered how we could have ended up being short 225 minutes. Then it hit me, I flubbed on my mathematical equations. "I am an idiot!" I thought. Well, Kenzie came home and I told her that she could still reach her goal if she started reading from the moment she got home till it was bedtime. After some thought, and she really did think about it, she said that she was happy with what she had done and that it was okay that she didn't get to eat with the principal. (Now you may be thinking, why did I let her just give up? This is what I say, she met her goal of reading 400 minutes, and then she met her goal of reaching 1000 minutes. I was really proud of her hard work. I didn't want her to revert back to hating reading because I made her sit for 6 hours reading books while the other kids played outside in the one nice sunny day we finally got. She got to choose and she was happy with her choice.) I am proud of my little reader.She has made great strides in the last couple of months.

One of the stations at the carnival was  getting your face painted. Mackenzie chose to get her face painted like a kitty cat. She came home from school with such a big grin. She had so much fun and got to do ALL the activities. Good Job Kenzie Kenz!