Hellobee Boards

@Alba4: that's terrible--I would have been panicked and livid, simultaneously. I work in a middle school, so the kids are much older and STILL, it is one of our afternoon duties that a teacher gets on every single bus and checks the bus tag. Each bus rider has a color coded tag that goes on their backpack, and the bus doesn't leave until we check that every student has a seatbelt and that every student has the write color tag.

We have Parent-Teacher Conferences this week! Anyone else been through this yet? Anyone have any good questions I should ask??

We got Progress Reports last week. Xander scored "Satisfactory" in everything (that's as good as it gets here). Besides that, I don't really have any idea how he's doing in school. He enjoys it, so I guess that's good.

I'm thinking of just asking the teacher how she thinks he's doing, if there's anything I should be aware of, and if there's anything we should work on at home. But other than that, I don't really know what I should ask/look for!

@Mrs. Carrot: Same here! In daycare, I got to talk to the teachers everyday, so I got a good sense for how things were going and if there were any concerns, they told me immediately. But in Kindergarten, it's crickets! We had an Open House, so I had an opportunity to meet the teacher and she talked about what they are doing day-to-day and answered general questions, but nothing specific about MY kid. This Parent-Teacher Conference is only 15 minutes too!! Gahh!!!

@JCCovi: Is there a reason you asked about the social dynamic? Just curious because it hadn't occurred to me to ask about that.

@Mrs. Carrot: Ahh, okay, that makes sense. Xander already talks about his new best friends, and I see how he interacts with one of them at pick-up, so I'm not really worried about the social aspect since he seems to have already made friends! I was definitely concerned originally because none of his pre-k friends were going to the same school as him, but he seems to have made friends just fine. I may still ask about it though - thanks!

@hitchhiker: Thanks! I like the idea of an open-ended question so that if there's anything the teacher can think of, she'll tell me.

@erinbaderin: My only suggestion with sight words (and we don't have a ton of experience yet either) is just practice when you can! I'll read some of those Level 1 books to my kids and when I come to a sight word that Xander's had already, I'll stop and point it out and let him tell me which word it is. He only has 5 sight words so far (I, a, it, can, are), so we're not stringing together any sentences, but I figure letting him practice identifying the words he's supposed to know regularly is good practice, right?

@Adira: @rattles: Thanks! I had never even heard of sight words, so anything is a start! We got I, a, see, and on, so I wrote them on squares of paper and then on some other squares drew some simple pictures (spider, Mom, Dad (both stick figures), ant) and let him make some simple sentences, but that was all I could think of.

@erinbaderin: our teacher also suggested making a memory matching game and using those Trader Joe’s alphabet cookies at snack time to spell them. I haven’t done those, but just for more ideas...

@rattles: Are they testing kids that early in your school? I went to a G&T meeting at ours and what they do is observe all the kids from K and up and look for kids who might be particularly stronger in certain subjects (ie, verbal processing, math, etc) and anyone who stands out in that way, they add extra instruction for them in that area to keep them challenged, but the testing for G&T doesn't start until 1st grade and it's behavioral, not academic, and coupled with observation, so they don't even qualify for a G&T program until 3rd grade.

@Adira: I think 20 minutes. They also let us bring the other kids, who could either sit outside or in the classroom. We had them in the classroom, because my younger son is 2 and not to be trusted out of sight, but they did not pay any attention to us.

I can’t wait for parent teacher conferences! Ours are in the first week of December. I think they do evaluations, so it will be interesting to hear about that. I’ll be asking mostly about social/emotional. Our daughter is the youngest in the class (will be 5 on Halloween)and there is a 22 month span. We know our teacher socially and she said you can tell she’s the youngest because she doesn’t have the stamina of the other kids, but that she keeps up academically. It made me really sad because if we had universal pre-K or could afford to send her to a different pre-K program or private K at the Waldorf school we would have done that, but we just couldn’t afford it.

@Adira: We had our PTC two or three weeks ago. I was pleasantly surprised that the teacher sent a form home the Friday before asking what concerns we had and what we wanted to talk about so she could prepare resources or watch for specific behaviors. DH and I decided our biggest concern was DD’s demeanor. Is she happy? Does she like K? Our DD has always been a negative Nancy. She can complain about a day at Disneyland after having a blast. So naturally we only hear negative things about K. With daycare and preschool we got reassurance from the staff that she was happy all day. We don’t get the same at K and we were pretty stressed about it. We have also long been told she’s not a great listener so we wanted to gauge that. We have been getting bad reports at aftercare and she’s had been pretty awfully behaved at home and shutting down on homework. Fortunately when DH and I unloaded all these concerns the teacher told us she sees a happy girl that is excited to learn. It was all positive. The teacher walked us through any reading and math areas that she hadn’t mastered by the assessment date. Then we asked again about the listening issues. The teacher assured us DD wasn’t anywhere on her list of non-listeners. The conference lifted a lot of stress and uncertainty for us. Now we’re focusing on aftercare hurdles.

@Adira: My daughter is young for K (below the cutoff) so we’re monitoring her socially to see if we need to hold her back next year. Everything seems fine but it’s nice to get the teachers perspective.

Also, in general I think the social dynamic is important to keep an eye on. Your kid might tell you about the kids they play with but they probably won’t tell you about the kid who they are leaving out and they may/may not tell you who is leaving them out. The teachers can give a lot more insight into this sort of think if it’s happening. Lots of good parenting opportunities at this age!

It’s interesting to hear about what kids seem to be learning in the US in kindergarten. I’m in Canada and my kid is in french immersion. My understanding is that they start teaching them reading in english in gr. 1 and reading in french in gr. 2. Kinder so far seems to be a lot of playing, fine motor skill dev’t, recognizing patterns, singing and stories. And learning whatever french vocab comes with it. It seems very different. And the only homework she’s had was to decorate a “turkey feather” for Thanksgiving.

Our PTC is tomorrow, so i'll update with K specifics then. But we have already had 2 years of public pre-k and we always had 2 PTC a year (fall and spring) and they have a checklist they go over. It's been 90% "academic" (as academic as a pre-k3 and pre-k 4 class can be), but they do cover some social-emotional things as well. Since they are pretty thorough with the academic stuff, I usually follow up with social questions--- how does M get along with other kids? Are there any kids in particular she does not get along with? Does she follow direction well? Are there any issues you've noticed that I should be aware of? Does she seem happy during the day? How is her gross motor skills compared to the other kids? How are her fine motor skills compared to her class?

Some of the academic stuff from the pre-k years were:
-Letters, upper and lower (they reported how many they knew at the beginning of the year, vs the end).
-writing their own name
-cutting skills
-recognizing numbers
-counting, basic addition
-coloring skills
-drawing skills--they actually have a rubric where the teacher marks for each thing the student adds when drawing a picture of themselves--like the beginning body with a giant round head and legs coming out of it would be scored lower (not lower in a bad way, lower as in more beginner) than a head on a body with arms, legs, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair, etc.
-Oral vocabulary

I honestly can't remember it all, so I will update after tomorrow if there are any big changes between how Pre-k conferences went and how K conference goes tomorrow.

My oldest has always been advanced academically despite being one of the younger kids (July birthday in a Sept cutoff district), so usually my questions are more related to emotional maturity and physical milestones--especially physical, since she's more average to slow-end-of-average in physical milestones.

They don't test for GT here until the end of 1st grade, and then they start a small pull out program in 2nd. I may ask if her teacher this year thinks M might be advanced, but I may also just wait until next year's teacher to ask.

****WARNING--LONG PART AHEAD*****

One question I have for this year, that I don't fully know how to word correctly/nicely, is if the teacher thinks M is getting enough academic attention. M is generally a very "easy" kid behaviorally, and for the 2nd year in a row, she has been in a class with a lot of challenging students, and I can only assume they do this purposely. 2 years in a row, she's been in a class with multiple teacher's aides who have 1-1 inclusion students. I know the teacher can't share info about other students with me, and I wouldn't ask anyway, but just from what M tells me, there are 2-3 kids with autism and 1 kiddo with DS (she doesn't know what autism is yet, and I don't even think she has noticed that one classmate has DS), but she just tells me stuff like "Johnny can't control himself. He's like Elsa, in Frozen, because he wants to control himself, but he can't, so he gets a special chair to sit in and he gets squishy tows and chewy toys." Or "Jillian gets tired a lot, so she gets to lay on the floor whenever she wants, or her helper teacher takes her somewhere fun when she is very tired and being loud, so we can concentrate on our learning". So in light of these comments, and because I know it's unusual for a class to have 1 teacher and 4 aides for 16 kids, I kind of want to ask if my kiddo is getting challenged academically.

She does bring home homework, and unfortunately it's the kind of homework I hate--it's an entire packet each week based on 1 letter of the alphabet. She's known all her letters since she was 3, she's been writing them all since 3.5, she can write short sentences on her own now and she can read beginner books now. So how do I word this, knowing that the teacher really has her hands full?

Should I just ask for more challenging work? Or just continue to do our own thing at her level at home? I can't see any evidence they do any math at school, and at home she's already doing double digit addition and subtraction. So yeah, how do I ask this without coming off like a "my child is so awesome" jerk?

@Adira: yeah, that's a good way to word it. The thing is, the homework is kind of time intensive, but it's all very repetitive and a lot of cutting/pasting/coloring. SO like....page 1 is writing upper case O and lower case o about 50 times, over and over on a lined page.
-Page 2 is to think of a word that starts with O and draw and color a picture of that word (So like draw and color an Owl or an Orange). Then write the word.
-Page 3 is various pictures with words at the bottom of the page. Color the pictures, then cut out the pictures and paste them in the little box with the corresponding O word.
-Page 4. Trace and write the suggested O words 10x each. (The teacher has a new O word on every other line, so student traces and then writes easy O words like out, on, over)
-Page 5. Color all the pictures and then match the O word to the right picture.

So the actual academic work is easy, and M can do it super fast. But the coloring and cutting and pasting....it ends up taking either over an hour if we do it all in 1 go (because she's type A with coloring and cutting) or at least 15 minutes a night, but at the end, what's she's learned is very low level---just how to recognize O words.

Does this seem like good homework for a K class? I honestly don't know if this is "good" homework or "time waster" homework.

@Anagram: No, that homework is shit (sorry if I've offended anyone!!!!). Our kindergarten class doesn't even have homework. That sounds like busy-work and not valuable at all!

@Adira: okay, I agree. But I didn't know if I was being harsh, because my husband likes that she has this busy homework. He thinks it's going to teach M to expect homework every night and she'll "get used to it", and I think it's going to turn her off to school work.

@erinbaderin: It's given on a Monday and not due till Friday. So we usually either sit down on Monday or Tuesday and do it all, or we break it into 2 nights. This week I wanted to try something different, so last night I had her complete all the written work that didn't require coloring or cutting--that was fast, about 15 min or less. SO now tonight and tomorrow, I'll break up the coloring/cutting part.

But yes, I agree that it's a lot of busy work for low return. I also wonder, for the kids who don't know these letters yet, if the coloring/cutting/pasting is really helping them learn the letters.