Z is for Ziggurat

Ziggurat. Well that's a word you don't hear every day (unless you're in 6th grade social studies). So what does ziggurat have to do with Down syndrome? It doesn't. What it does have to do with is Kayla and school; and it seemed the perfect word to use for this "Z" post.

Earlier in the school year Kayla brought home her study guide for Mesopotamia and I cringed looking at some of the vocab words: polytheistic, ziggurats, Code of Hammurabi, cuneiform. How was she ever going to learn and retain the terminology of words that are so far removed from our vocabulary? Honestly, I didn't even remember what some of these words meant. I think my exact words were, "What the heck is a ziggurat?!" I'm sure I must have learned about it during my unit on Mesopotamia, but remembering what it was all these many, many years later? No.

I used quizlet.com and made flash cards and printed those out to study with her. We played matching games of turning over all the cards and trying to find the definition to the word/phrase.

Kayla is the type of person who doesn't test tell. We review, review, and review at home and (most of the time) she gets it, but then her test will come back and it's often a face palm of wondering why she put that wrong answer over something we know that she knows. We often say, "Kayla you know this!" and she will point out the right answer. So I had no idea how this first test was going to go. I didn't know how her teacher would set up the test for her - multiple choice? fill in the blank? true or false? matching?

He did a matching test for her, and he realized that having all 10 terms/definitions on one page was too overwhelming (she is impulsive [hello ADHD] and won't take the time to look through all the answers to find what matches the vocab word definition) so he broke it down for her on two pages with 5 terms on each. That's just what she needed to focus.

I would have been happy if she got 7 of them right, even though she seemed to know all of them pretty well when we reviewed the night before.

This is how she did.

She will not always 'ace' her tests, and rarely does, so to see this ... I was just so dang proud of her.

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