Friday, November 9, 2007

PTC with the teacher

I had my meeting with C's actual teacher today. As her first point, she mentioned that he is behind in reading. So it is an all around perception. I was really disappointed to hear that. He actually seems a little behind in nearly everything. They have a number based report card and 3s are grade level. He got mostly 2s, which is working towards grade level. So we are going to start pushing hard and doing more (we already probably do as much or more than most parents) and really get him where he needs to be by the end of the second quarter.

He also has impulse control problems because he is a 6 year old BOY, for crying out loud. And she said as much and pointed out that at various points in the day all the kids have impulse control problems. She did confirm that she thinks he knows a lot more than he lets on, now to get him to show what he knows.

Something that made me feel a little better (I feel like a crap mom because he is behind) was his teacher saying that he is doing great in some areas and she can tell that is because he has so much support at home. Then I emailed his reading teacher and asked for the letter list to work on and what his goals are for sight words (I did them with him and even for me, he only knew half of them and had to be prompted on half of those). She emailed me back and told me that she would get that for me on Monday and then thanked me for being so involved. So I'm happy about that.

I also got reports from art, math and PE and he is doing well in all those classes. In fact, surprisingly, he exceeds standards in PE, which really surprises me. He is graceful and strong (TKD and gymnastics are good choices for activities for him) but rather uncoordinated. He doesn't kick, catch or throw well, yet he exceeds expectations in PE! Must be some low expectations :)

In other news, I moved my whole house around. The kids always want to play in the art center and the kitchen, which are closest to Evan's room. It is a pain to constantly be having to say no or telling them to be quite while they are playing there. I spent the better part of the afternoon moving all my centers around, sweeping under the furniture, hauling toys out of my living room (anything that doesn't go with a center gets stuck in the toy boxes, which I only allow one to be open at a time)and stashing the extras under the stairs.

Next weekend, I'm taking the janky cabinet out of the laundry room and putting our dressers in there. Then I'm hanging up a rod to hang clothes on and a shelf to store soap and things that sit on the janky cabinet. I'm also getting a shelf to go near the new are center to store extra paint brushes, craft items, etc. I'm also going to work on getting some kind of storage at the bottom of the stairs. There isn't a lot of room so I can't have things that stick out too far. I'm thinking about hanging up some bags or something where I can stash stuff that needs to go upstairs. As opposed to the current situation where we lay stuff on the stairs and try not to kill ourselves on it.

1 comment:

Ros said...

Hey! He's 6, he may be "behind" the rest of his class, but he's working on his own timetable. For the stairs junk -- would a basket work? I have a large basket at the bottom of my stairs & try to carry it up (or down, depending) regularly. I also consider stair-climbing as part of my exercise, so if I take something upstairs right away, it's part of my healthy lifestyle. (NOT) And for sight words . . . have you heard about the size of kids' memories at different ages? A really good way to learn sight words is by sticking in only one unknown word for every 3 known words (one of my profs has a whole instructional method, this is part of it). HTH.