Back to School - Bennett

Bennett is in 2nd Grade, 7.5 years old!  I can't believe it.  He matured alot over the summer.  He seems and acts so much older all of a sudden and even though it's nice, it makes me realize he's by no means a little kid anymore.  Like 2nd grade...really, how did that happen!!!  

Our school has two classes to a classroom.  But, since his 2nd grade class has 18 and the 1st grade class has I think 14, it is way too many kids for a room and this is the first time in the schools 100 year history that they have split a classroom.  So Bennett has his very own 2nd grade classroom with his 18 kids - 5 boys and 13 girls.  His teacher is a new teacher to the school too - Mrs. LaPlant, who is our Pastor's wife.  She babysat Bennett while I was at work for the first 6ish months of his life.  

Bennett and Ashley are very opposite with their school work and likes and dislikes about school.  Bennett loves recess and gym time and any other time where he is not doing homework!  He is a pretty rowdy boy I think which makes me nervous that he's going to get himself in trouble.  He's a really good kid at school though - polite, nice to his friends, does what he's told, and works as hard as he's able.  He likes math, science (weather especially), and hands-on type work - constructing, building etc.  He HATES (yes hates!) reading and it shows.  Ashley and Bennett are pretty much on the same reading levels.  I have tried so many different types of books and different reading series to hopefully find one that sparks an interest for him to actually want to read it.  He struggles and since he know he struggles, he just doesn't want to work at getting better.  He knows the easy sight words but he is not willing to sound out a word that he doesn't know which makes it very frustrating for him, and me.  He's supposed to read 10 minutes every night for homework and that 10 minutes can take half an hour because I just can't get him to focus on it.  The good thing is though that my mom is one of the teachers that works with him on the reading so I know he's getting great help and it's nice that I can go to her too.  The other thing that we will be working on again this year is his speech.  He went to speech class to the public school for half an hour, once a week last year and it definitely helped but he still has problems remember the TH, L and SH sounds in his speaking...he's a fast little talker when he's excited about telling you something and he just can't get those couple of sounds out correctly.  So hopefully one more year of speech class and he'll get it nailed down.