Gavin Parent Teacher Conferences

We just had Gavin’s second parent teacher conference last week and it went really well.  The first one we had back in the fall was a bit of a shock to Ryan and I and didn’t quite go as well as we were expecting.  We discovered a few behavioral issues that Gavin was having in class and that he was rushing through his work and sometimes not even finishing it so he could get to the next activity which was free-choice/play time.  He was also behind on his reading (at a level Pre-A when they need to be at a D at the end of the year) and really behind on his site words.  I think Ryan and I were a little naïve and just assumed that since he’s always been a quick learner and did well in preschool that he would just pick up everything he needed to know at school and didn’t realize how much we also needed to work with him at home.  I think part of it was that in the past when we had tried to work on site words with him he would get frustrated really easily if he didn’t know and just quit trying so we kind of gave up and the other part was that he wasn’t putting in full effort at school to actually show his teacher what he knew since a lot of the words she had marked as not knowing he knew when we quizzed him.  So we got to have a little chat with Gavin about his behavior at school and started to really work with him on his site words.  It wasn’t a fun task for him so we just worked it into our routine that when we were waiting a few minutes for his bell to ring before school we would practice a new set of words in the car until he had them memorized.  I had to add some incentives to get him to really try and I think it helped that it was just part of our routine and we did it the same time every day because we found that it was pretty hard to get him to sit down at night and work on them when he knew his brother was off playing somewhere.

So needless to say we were a little nervous coming into the second round of conferences because we really didn’t know what to expect this time around but were hoping things would be better and thankfully it went really well.  All the work with site words and reading at home has really paid off and Gavin is now at a level C and right on track.  He is also doing much better with his writing and taking more time to do his work at school although there were still a few instances of him rushing and not finishing his work.  We also didn’t have any more behavioral issues and he is really excelling in math.  We never really practice math at home but he has always been interested in doing math and playing with or counting money.  During the conference his teacher had him do several math word problems where he could use blocks or his fingers to get to the answer and he just did them all really fast in his head.  We couldn’t believe it because two of them were pretty tricky.  He loves math and building so maybe we have a future engineer on our hands J.  We were thrilled with his progress, he continues to enjoy school and we were able to celebrate that night with a fun little treat!