Educational Stuff

We had our parent-teacher conference with Anna's teachers several weeks ago. It seems she's doing well and has come a long way since our first conference back in October. They said that she "has found her place in the classroom." She's "far ahead of the game regarding letters." They tested her at knowing 25 upper case and 25 lower case letters (I thought she knew them all) and said she has made great improvements in numbers and meaningful counting. They said she's shown progress in using materials appropriately, being task-oriented and completing work in a timely manner, working independently/being self-directed, following 2/3 step directions, responding well to adults. We need to work with her on sequencing pictures (arranging in correct order, for example, these pictures: a child grabs for a jacket; the child puts the jacket on; the child zips it up; the child walks outdoors).

They also showed us two pages each with the same photos. In the fall, she was asked to color the pictures with the appropriate colors; and again she was asked to do the same thing in the spring. In the fall she colored the tomato, frog, window, grapes and squirrel orange and the banana pink with some blue stripes. In the spring, she colored the tomato red, the frog green, the window peach, the grapes purple, the squirrel gray and the banana yellow. She also apparently does a lot of cutting at school — which helps with fine motor skills — and is now cutting curves as well as straight lines. (Both kids LUV to cut, BTW. I recently bought them each age-appropriate scissors. Anna even gave me a sudden "thank you for buying me scissors" while in the middle of her first cutting session.)

All in all, we were pretty happy with what we heard. She continues to have potty accidents at school, though. Not every day and not even every week. But this week she had two accidents.

There are only three more weeks of school left, and May is going to be very busy for them. I think she will be going on three field trips and will also have something called "Wheels Day," when the students bring their bikes or trikes to school for a day of fun.

In other educational news, today while we were driving around Alexander asked me what letter random words start with. They started with objects he saw through the window. After a bit, I went into teacher mode and turned the tables on him and was shocked when he could tell me that D was for dog, M for mommy and A for Anna and Alexander.
Anna has been doing this for a while and knows what many words begin with and is actively sounding out most letters, or at least I'm actively encouraging it when we read books. She also just learned what an exclamation point is and a question mark and how they're used.

I'm including a photo of Anna's first drawings. At least this is the first I've ever seen her draw. If she's done these at school, she hasn't brought them home. Usually when she takes pen to paper it has been sort of chicken scratch and scribbles and some letters or attempts at letters, lines, circles. But a few weeks ago she sat on my lap while I was sitting at our desk and said she wanted to draw Daddy (her drawing of him is the largest figure on the left). I instructed her to draw a circle for a head, then the lines commonly seen in stick figures, fingers, etc. I didn't hold her hand to guide it and was impressed at her drawings. She even drew pupils in the eyes! I haven't done research to know if this is on schedule, behind or ahead for her age group. But it doesn't matter. It was all new to me, so I was pretty excited!