Our parent-teacher conference for Peter was tonight (Dan had to miss part of his dinner hour break in his own conference time to attend) and I feel better about things. The teacher spent the first 18 minutes showing us assessments and projects Peter has done, telling us what they indicate about his progress. After mostly getting calls/emails when something was wrong for the past two months, it was comforting to spend the bulk of the time seeing all the things he can do. He's been having spelling tests and we found out that they haven't gone over the words first, which makes tests of "pig", "pot", "spot", etc more interesting -- it's a way they determine whether kids understand the letter blends they've gone over. I realized how much his handwriting has improved in the two months since school began -- everything's facing the right way and inside the proper lines and spaces between the words. I look at his papers and books and say yep, he's reading. The teacher takes the same materials and sees so many facets of what he's learning. I appreciate that they practice writing both by looking at pictures of objects and hearing words -- both visual and auditory learners can show what they know. My father came out in me the other day when Peter brought his first subtraction flash cards home. So far, they've done addition with doubles 0-9 , adding one, adding zero, and subtracting one. I was curious to see if he could stretch that further and made him a sheet with addition of two, three, or four, plus some goofy ones like 300+100 and 1000+0. I think he got them all right, although he may have had to use his fingers with some of the addition with three or four. His favorite sheets are ones where it's a fake person's paper and he gets to correct the wrong answers. There might be too many teachers in his family tree. I have fond memories of my dad giving me crazy, complicated algebra equations to solve a year or two before taking algebra in school. It's probably not most people's idea of a fun time.
For the last couple minutes of the conference, we talked about Peter's acting silly at inappropriate times. It came off more that he's a five year old kid who doesn't have either the patience or maturity to better deal with situations. Last year, he sat on kids' feet or knocked their stuff off the table as a way to let them know he wanted to play. This year, he tries to make people laugh when someone chastises him or if he can't deal with sitting quietly anymore. When I think of it that way, it seems like he's made pretty good progress. The teacher also pointed out that all the kids get pretty wiggly still after sitting 15 minutes or so. They get a 40 minute recess and sometimes a second one, and she keeps them rotating to different activities in longer segments (starting the year at 15 minutes and working up to 30) to help keep them engaged. But they're five. They can only do so much. Peter's natural tendency is to sit by himself with a book or building something -- he's finding ways to cope that we aren't fond of. But I feel now like we can work with him to an extent and beyond that, he just needs to get a bit older and realize no one thinks it's funny when he acts like that.
