Oliver Button is a Sissy...and Thai vs. Tie

So if you read this blog regularly you know all about Rebecca.  My mom refers to her as every teacher's dream...and she is. Every week we hang out for a couple of hours.  We have a routine we normally stick to:

We review her homework...

She reads me what she's written in her communication journal

and I write her back.

She completes her spelling test

and we move along to a new poem of the week.

 Normally Rebecca aces her spelling tests ever time...but last week was different.  She was having an off day.  I didn't even bother grading the sentences portion of her test.  I opted instead to write, "Slow down! Take your time!" It's something that we all have to be reminded to do every once in awhile.

I wanted to focus on some grammatical and spelling errors that I've noticed she makes somewhat consistently.  We noted the rhyming words in her new poem, and jotted down new vocabulary words as well:

From her communication journal, homework, and poetry notes I noticed that Rebecca needed to focus a bit more on homonyms, so we took some time and reviewed a few that we'd encountered during the lesson:

I wrote down the homonyms on a flip chart we made out of a sheet of paper, and she illustrated the different meanings.

As a transition activity, she doodled for a bit using the Do-A-Dot Markers she loves.


One of the homonym pairs we talked about were "Thai" and "tie."

For homework I asked her to find a Thai recipe and write it down with her mom:

We moved along to our book of the week.  We're officially in a Tomie dePaola theme:

Before reading the story, Rebecca had no idea what the term "sissy" is meant to infer.  I explained that it's a derogatory term used by incredibly insensitive and uniformed individuals who think that boys should only do "boy" things. They use "sissy" to describe boys who don't necessarily do stereotypically "boy" things.  We both agreed the notion of "boy" things or "girl" things is ridiculous.

One thing that struck me was Rebecca's reaction to Oliver's father in the story.  Like many dads, he wants his kid to be into playing ball.  At one point, he says the following:

We'd been taking turns reading aloud up until this page.  I'd read this particular part.  Rebecca stopped me and looked puzzled before saying, "I can't believe a father would say something like that to his own son."  

"Neither can I," I replied.

We sat there a moment contemplating, then read on.