Fall conferences

A couple of weeks ago, we had The Little Sis’s fall parent-teacher conference at daycare. Our old daycare didn’t do formal assessments like this, but I find it’s nice to gather information on where your child is currently, what her strengths/weaknesses are, and find out what skills she should be working toward. The Little Sis’s report was very positive — they said she is happy and bright and friendly and is right where she should be regarding things like letter recognition, color identification, and more. One thing we should probably practice more at home is writing her name, as her attempt at that was largely unrecognizable. (I think I made out part of her first letter, but only because I know what it should have been.)

The other comment was that she had been going through a few weeks where she had unexplained accidents a few times a week (which we obviously knew about), but by the time we met for the conference, we seemed to have a better handle on that, so hopefully we’ve moved past that. (Translation: She gets two gummi bears from us for having “potty power” at daycare, and the accidents disappeared immediately. Knock on wood.) They were most impressed with how many letters she knows the sounds of right now — they said they’re not focusing on that at all right now, but we’ve been taking advantage of her strong interests in letters and letter sounds at home, and I’m glad to see it’s benefiting her.

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Last week we met with The Big Sis’s teacher for her fall conference. We were told that the Big Sis is above grade level in all areas of assessment, and her MAP scores (199 for both reading and math) are right where they’d expect them to be for her. The Teacher has no concerns with The Big Sis, academically or otherwise, which is always a relief to hear. (I did challenge The Teacher, mostly jokingly, when she said The Big Sis followed all directions the first time. I noted that I’d love her to do the same at home.)

What’s interesting, though, is that we had a 20-minute time slot for the conference, and the first 10 minutes were spent talking about The Big Sis, then somehow The Teacher got sidetracked and told us all about her long journey (that included seven miscarriages) to at-birth adoption of her daughter, who is now 6. I shared that The Husband and I understood such heartache, as we had to take our own medical steps to get The Little Sis and had experienced two losses of our own. That part of the conversation went on so long that we exceeded our initial 20-minute time slot and went over by 10 minutes. Oops! (Sorry, other parents who were waiting!) I have to say, I certainly didn’t expect The Teacher to share all of this with us, but it was nice that she did. (I’m going to pretend that we gave off a vibe that indicated to her that we’d understand, instead of imagining that she told 24 other sets of parents the same stories!)