UIL

Brooke's biggest detriment to her at school is her not following through with directions or not reading directions all the way through or something along those lines.  She always makes A's when it comes on her report card.  But has some B's in there as daily/major grades and the B's are always ALWAYS because she didn't follow directions.  When asked the question directly she always gets it right.  It is so frustrating...for me as a parent more than anything.  Brooke!  You know this stuff!  Arg.

Anyway, so.  Fast forward to her UIL competition a couple of weeks ago.  In 2nd grade, they can only compete as members of a writing team or story telling team.  (I can't wait for 3rd grade for her to do music memory or spelling!)  So she chose writing.  After school practices went well...they could only take 3 as part of the team and Brooke was one of the ones selected.  She does write very well.  Her stories make me laugh, are full of details, conversational writing and good dialogue.  I think I mentioned that one of the other teachers recommended one of her papers up to a 4th grade teacher.  She really does write well.  So I was excited for her to do this!

The good part about writing is that they do it ahead of time, turn it in and then only are present at UIL for awards.  So Thursday before her coach pulled her out of class to do her writing.  Thursday afternoon, she had to be called back to finish her story (apparently she wanted to add a bit more).  I never looked at it but it was about 5 pages long!  However, on Friday, as I was tremendously excited because somehow Brooke managed to make her obscenely high AR goal of 70 points!!!, her coach stopped me to tell me she was so beyond frustrated with Brooke after reading her story.  There was nothing she could do now.  Story was written.  But apparently she wrote a FABULOUS story.  One of the best she said a 2nd grader had written.  However.  It was not about the prompt.  Ahhhhhhhhh!!!   Prompt was "flashlight" and she said Brooke wrote this fabulous mystery type story about a boy getting tricks played on him, etc etc etc... and only mentioned in one line...  "and he had a flashlight".

***screeeeeeech****

Halt to a super duper excited mommy to ACK!  What?!?!

I was so bummed.  So frustrated.  BROOKE!!!!  Ugh.

So.  I have yet to receive the story back yet (I hope we still get it back - I will be sure to share it), but needless to say she didn't win the competition.  :/


We still went to UIL that day, of course.  She got to be a part of it, got a participation award and all and hopefully next year will have it figured out.  Of course, by next year, she already has said she wants to do spelling.  (and yea, you can only do one event)

Here's a couple of pics I snapped day of awards of the 2nd grade creative writing team.