Parent Teacher Conferences

I was so excited to have parent teacher conferences this year. I already knew that Jenny's would be good. Her teacher basically said that she is almost beyond what they can teach her in PPCD, though she is still having her speech issues - which are much better by the way. So Jenny may be going to Pre-K for part of the time now. We shall see. We are probably going to have a phone conference about all this some time next week, after the next benchmark they have.

Ryan was a different story. He is having some behavior issues, as evidenced by the notes sent home every day(they have a new system where you get something, good or bad.) 75% of the time Ryan has been talking, or disruptive, or uncooperative, or not doing his work. Darrell and I were thinking that maybe he is getting bored, which is possible. So like I said we knew that there were some things to discuss. We were shocked to find out that the boy is not writing. They are given 20 minutes a day of writing time. When the time is up and Ryan has not written anything, what he tells his teacher is that "I was thinking". And so the perfectionist is back. He also got a 0 on his writing benchmark. When the math teacher was showing us his math benchmark, his homeroom teacher commented that that was the most writing she had seen from Ryan. He is writing too much in math and not enough in writing. So we are now having writing time every night at home. I am aiming to teach him how to utilize his time at school and I think that it is working. I am going to e-mail his teacher next week and ask her how it is going.

The other thing they said was that while he may be bored, he is still learning some new things along with the rest of the class, and he just needs to get used to it. I do have to agree with that, even though it is hard because he is at such a higher reading level than everyone else. On the level they use they want first graders to be at a level c and he is at a level i - he could be at a level j if he would slow down and think about the story he is reading more. Just to give an idea on his reading. Crazy huh? Oh, and he is getting 100 in his math, so soon, since they have done the benchmark, he will start to be challenged in math. I am excited about that. Now we get to see where he can go with that, because up until now, it has been all about the reading.

Anyway, I am glad that we were able to go and have a good conversation with both of our children's teachers. Now to keep up the communication, and help our children to be able to live up to expectations.