Parent-teacher conference

The girls got excellent reports during the parent-teacher conference today. They received their first mid-term grades today, with lots of As and several 100s. We are proud of them and are going to treat them to something special this weekend.

This school district has changed up how they do the parent-teacher conference every year we have been here. The first year they dismissed school an hour early every day for an entire week and scheduled conferences for the rest of the afternoon. Last year they didn't let school out early at all. They just started the conferences as soon as school was dismissed at regular time each day for a week. This year they let school out for an entire day, and scheduled conferences all day long on that one day.

That left me with five kids for the day today. Since we're in a walking mood, we walked/skated/biked to school for the conferences with my two girls' teachers. (The other two girls' mother did phone conferences with their teachers.) While we were there the kids gave out hugs and played inside my daughter's first grade classroom and outside.

Both of the girls' teachers said the girls are doing very well and showed me their mid-term grades to prove it.

My nine-year-old daughter has all As as usual, and even a 100 in spelling so far. She has an A in math, which she normally does, but this is the subject she struggles with. She will be able to keep these grades up and be on the all A honor roll for the first grading period. Her grades will probably go down a couple of points or so as the year goes on and the subject matter gets harder. Besides math the thing she has to work on across the board is paying attention to what she is doing. Sometimes she misses questions, not because she didn't know the answer, but because she didn't see it or didn't pay attention to the directions. We always have to work on that with her.

My six-year-old daughter has a very impressive 106 in math and 100s in social studies and spelling. She has As in reading and handwriting, although I'd like to see the handwriting point grade come up. There is some room for improvement in the language arts grade, but it will be very simple to help her. In fact, I've already seen some improvement in her skills this very day. They are working on sentence structure right now. My daughter has a precious thought pattern but needs to work on constructing her sentences properly. Here's all that means for now: a capital letter at the beginning of the sentence and no other capital letters in the sentence, spaces between the words, and a period at the end of the sentence. (See, I said that was simple!) She did beautifully on copying some phrases tonight. The wording she was copying was in all capital letters, and with two or three reminders she was able to properly copy the phrases, even changing the all capital letters to uppercase and lowercase on her own. Ir was very proud of her. We'll continue to work on writing each day and she'll have that grade up to an A in no time. That will help her handwriting grade too.

Their behavior in school is excellent as well. Their school has a points system. Each child starts out with five points and for certain infractions they lose a point. Throughout the school year my girls usually get three, four, or five "fours," which I think is very good. Nobody's perfect. My older daughter did get two fours in one week last year, and I got on her case pretty hard about that.

There are rewards at the school for honor roll and good behavior, and we usually have rewards at home too. My husband and sister-in-law gave them a nice party once last year. We are looking forward to a nice treat this weekend for all the good mid-term grades we got today!