Parent Teacher Conference

 In the midst of all the other stuff going on this last week, we also had Parent-Teacher Conference!  I also like hearing about how my kids act when I'm not around.  And everything I heard was not surprising.  All of them have basically doubled the amount of growth they are normally looking to see and have already met most (if not all) the requirements for passing their current grade so any more learning they do is a bonus!  

First was Mia.  Her teacher said she is doing great, but she is very hesitant and second guesses herself a lot.  She would be in the top of the class in math, but she isn't super confident in her abilities so she holds back a lot.  She is still doing amazing, but we just need to work on building her confidence! 

Next was Ava.  She also is doing great in Math and Reading.  But she totally bombed the part about rhyming.  Her teacher said some kids just take longer to understand the concept.  It's also a nice thing to know, but it's not going to impede her reading abilities (she scored pretty high on reading, so I know that's true)  and it's not something we need to spend a lot of time on outside of school.  She also is doing at better with focusing (yay!)  Ava has always been a little spacey, so it's good that she's learning how to harness that energy a little bit.  Another thing she said was that they get to see Asher at lunch every day (4th grade lunch and kindergarten lunch just happen to overlap) and one day Asher's class was late coming to lunch and Ava asked her teacher if she could call them to see if they were coming.  Those girls sure love their brother!

Last was Asher.  He started having a lot of trouble with behavior problems last year so I'm now a little apprehensive about meeting with his teacher.  But he has made so much progress this year.  His reading grade was a little low and I asked his teacher about it.  She said the class was split into 3 groups, each reading a different book.  Asher didn't really like the book and had trouble going along with the activities the rest of the group wanted to do, so he got a lot of incompletes because he refused to do the work.  He did that a lot last year and he's been doing better this year, but we still need to work on that.  If he feels like the work isn't important or something he wants to do, he'll push back so hard on it.  But she said the book they're reading now he likes a lot more and he's been doing much better.  She also said there are a bunch of rambunctious boys in class that are always causing problems.  Sometimes Asher will get overwhelmed with how loud they are and move to a table at the back of the class.  He'll still do his work and raise his hand and participate in discussions, he just needs a little space from the chaos in order to focus.  His teacher also said his best subject is math and he does so well in it!  She said the other day he made some comments in class that basically taught her whole lesson.  And they will often split into partners and he'll teach his friend how to do the assignment.  

Overall I felt really good about things.  They are all making great progress, get along well with (most) kids in their classes, and hopefully won't be missing school much more now that we got those stupid tonsils out!