Parent/Teacher Conferences

Last night we went to Ben's first Parent/Teacher Conference. The grading they do for the Kindergarten kids (I'm not sure how they do it for the older grades) is with a Y for Yes, an A for Almost, or an N for Not Quite. Ben mostly got Y's, with a few A's and even an occasional N (for things like bouncing and catching a ball). We did think it was kind of funny that on the alphabet testing they did, he missed the T. We thought he would miss the b and d, since he mixes those two up a lot, but he got all the lowercase ones right. His teacher told us that the beans are working really well, that sometimes all she has to do to get Ben to stop doing something is to say the word "bean". She said the other kids in the class are really supportive of Ben and always try to help him keep his beans too. They get excited for him when he gets to get a sticker. She said that she knows when she asks a question in class, that if she asks Ben, he always knows the right answer. She said that sometimes she'll ask a question and ask a few kids who will get it wrong, so she'll ask Ben so that they'll be able to hear the right answer. She also said she worries sometimes that she's not giving him enough to do and he'll get bored, since he seems to know it all pretty well. So she did send us home with a few books for him to read. We told her how he knows that an e at the end of a word makes the vowel sound like its name and she said she had just been teaching her second grade class that morning about that rule. She also showed us the iri testing scores they did at the beginning of the year (she had sent us home the score before) and told us what they'll be testing them on again. She said that Ben got the highest score for the Kindergarten kids in the whole school on that testing. So Ben's pretty smart and has been doing pretty well. He just needs to work a little more on some motor skills (pretty normal though), and maybe work more on jumping in and working with a group; he tends to be a bit stand-offish when they do their group games.