Maria’s teacher this year is awesome.  I really like her a lot; she loves the outdoors, is green, and is supportive of helping out in the community.  She also values the importance of technology in kids’ lives and showed us a statistic during orientation that a majority of second graders will have jobs when they get older that we haven’t even heard of today.  Amazing.

Maria gets a range of websites and apps to check out that help her better learn spelling or math.  Some of the kids in her class love to get on them and play them all night.  Maria is not in that category; she would much rather shoot videos or read friends’ blogs (another cool thing that Maria’s teacher started up).  I have to monitor her at the computer to ensure that she is spending some time on these math/spelling websites.  One site is called SumDog.  It is a big hit amongst the kids at her school, especially the boys.  She was interested for a couple of days but she gets so frustrated when she can’t get to 1st Place that she gives up and moves onto something else.  

Mario, on the other hand, has the complete opposite attitude.  He jumped on SumDog a few weeks ago when Maria got off of it and started to play asking me what the answers were to the math problems.  After a while, I started to give him hints for how to figure out the answers because I could not get anything done while standing next to him yelling out numbers.  I told him to look for a “S” in “Smallest” or a “L” in “Largest” and then he would know whether to choose the smallest or largest number.  He ran with that advice and eventually worked hard enough to get in 1st Place. He was so excited.  Then he moved onto the “+1” series and began counting “5+1” and “3+1” on his fingers in order to get the right number.  Each time I looked over at him, he was hitting 1st or 2nd Place. 

He loves the game. Every day after school, he begs to play it.  I hope he is this enthusiastic about it when he starts kindergarten.  The other night I found Maria trying to log him in under her account so that she would get credit for playing – I really do have to watch that girl!