halfway there

Well as the second term comes to an end I feel that our family is enveloped in this new schooling gig. Parent teacher interviews happened this week and I confess that I felt a bit weird about it - surely I wasn't ready to be in the parents' seat?? Due to all the contact we ahve with the school and the wonderful way theya re able to develop partnerships with families there were no real surprises.

Words for Hannah:awareness; great improvement;confident; growing ability to communicate what she is able to do; identify; recognises; make connections; good; appropriately; enjoys; happy; gentle; extremely well; enjoys reading; energy, smile and involvement demonstrate her growing ability to be engaged and a part of classroom activities; involved; individually; sit and listen; easily distracted; follow; progress; encourage; great work.

Words for Kit:enjoys; kind; thoughtful; Christian manner; listens; eager to respond; discuss; knows and uses; sound understanding; manipulates and sorts and describes; asks questions; willingly explores; confidently able; pleasing; conscientious; excited about learning; always really positive; easily engrossed; happily work on his own; fair effort; delight to teach.

So all good! Except that soon I feel DH and I may have to decide how we are going to parent Kit's academic progress. I know he is smart - his report agreed with that. I know he is one of 3 kids in kindy who are clearly working well above their peers in some areas. Kit started at reading level 1 or 3 (?- can't recall which one now!) and is currently reading at level 10. He scored outstanding for all the reading elements - but what about maths? As first time parents we want what is best for him. We love him exactly as he is. We also feel a tremendous resonsibility to draw out the very best opportunities for him. I worry that on some subconscious level I at least am overcompensating for Hannah having an intellectual disability. I feel I have a really good radar for what she is capable of. I am not so confident of the same for Kit. He got about 60% outstanding 40% satisfactory in the various maths criteria. Some of the satisfactory grades - are for things that we think he has been able to do for a long time. Others I really dont' know. Does it matter? Certianly we know that literacy has a high priority in the kindy. I know that maths is taught but I don't have astrong understanding of how as yet. There was a parent training morning on numeracy but unfortunately I wasn't able to attend. I have heard that the school is just starting to be involved in mathletics - but I dont' actually know what that is. So there you ahve it - are we being unrealistic? Torturing our gorgeous boy with unfair demands? Our concern is if the teacher doesn't recognise his strengths - will she be able to push him? How much are we projecting our own literacy biased experiences upon our son? At this point I don't know - but I know that if there is an issue - teh earlier it is dealt with the better - so how early is appropriate and how early is simply first time parents being overly pushy and unrealistic?
I don't mean to take away from the whole report experience - we are very proud of the achievements of the twins and the quality of the teaching is high.

Kit tells me they will be tested in gymnastics tomorrow - Hannah ahs absolutely loved gymnastics this term. Her teacher said that there was one instructor in particualr who had a really good sense of what she should be able to do and who was able to modify activities for her. Kit tells me all the teachers help Hannah in gym. I am hoping that her teacher is able to get some ideas from the gym providers on hwo we can continue this activity for Hannah out of school hours...

FItzroy readers

Hannah has had a FR at home for the past couple of weeks. She is really finding the second half of the book difficult - it has all the rhyming words - cat, fat, sat, bat, rat, hat in it - introducing them one or two at a time but eventually using them all in a sentence. Hannah seems to really struggle then - she doens't seem to be able to tel the difference between them so well. I have tried showing her how to sound them out 'c-at' etc but I am not sure that that was working that well - I need her to enjoy learning to read - she relaly lvoes books and reading so I don't want to lose that. I then helped her to draw the cover page - a big fat cat and then I got ehr to cut out the words of the title and sequence them and then paste them onto her picture which she really enjoyed. I made the book into a powerpoint presentation - where I tried to emphasise particular words - eg I underline sat each time it appears and bold the m on mat. 'and' is in red font and 'on' is bold. 'fat' as in 'fat cat' is in italics. Most of the others I have left aolone - I think c b and r are reasonably different so have't really done anything to make them stand out. I have only used it with her twice and it seems to help a little in that she did better reading it today than yesterday.

I started to wonder if follwoing the same path as the other early readers in her class is the way to go. I checked out Downsed and it appears that the common view is that children following the regular literacy program in mainstream (with various supports I assume) does work well. So - my quesiton is - does what I am doing sound right? I know with numeracy they suggest teaching 4 and 5 away from each other because they are easily confused becasue they look similar. Any suggestions on how I can continue to help Hannah with her reading of books like this one?

Friend

I wish I could post a photo here - but for privacy of the other child I won't ...
Tonight when I was unpacking Hannah's schoolbag I found a sheet of A4 green paper. On it in the lovely kindy style handwriting are 6 words - some of the letters are backtofront, one word is incomprehensible - but the magic of those words I could read - To Hannah ? ???? from your Friend S****. How beautiful is that! I made sure I talked with her about it - and how she should draw a picture for him tomorrow. Then I showed it to the adults in the room. S**** is a little boy who also went to the same LDC as teh twins last year. He is a gorgeous little fellow and just recentlyt he teachers have rearranged the kids reading groups - and he and Hannah are in the same one. Just lovely. It made my day - well almost - so did getting 100% on a numeracy quiz for Uni - that's never happened before lol! Magic what a whole day's revision for one little quiz can do...