Teacher Conference

This morning we went to our end of the year teacher conference with our princess' kindergarten teacher. We have really been very pleased with this particular teacher and the school in general. The school is so well run and organized. Her growth has really exceeded our expectations.

I was particularly happy to learn that the system by which she is evaluated for her reading level is very thorough. I don't know all of the metrics that the teacher is looking at but she did explain it on a high level. At the beginning of kindergarten they are usually reading at an "A" level and by the end of the year the school expects them to be reading at a "C" level. Our teacher's goal is to read at a "D" level. Our princess is reading at an "H" level so I am particularly happy about that. The one thing that the teacher explained to us was that the school has a really great resource center that allows the children to use materials that suit their individual learning levels, not necessarily the level of the other students. So if there are children that fall above or below the average level of the rest of the kids, the teacher can provide materials to each kid at that level. So that made me feel very good.

Her evaluation of her math skills went really well too. She knows how to tell time but now we are going to work on fractions of hours like half hour, 15 minutes past the hour, etc. She understands most denominations of money except for the quarter (but she sure knows how to spend it!). We will work on her money skills too. She also can add and subtract single digit numbers and can count to 100 by 10s and 5s and can count to 20 by 2s. So exciting.

One skill that I have been working on is money. I try to give her every opportunity to understand money because I think it is important to know these skills early on. When she got $5 from the tooth fairy a few weeks ago I took her to the toy store and helped her pick out something that was within her price range. I also let her pay for it at the counter and let her receive the change. We counted the change together. She has a piggy bank and we put our change in the piggy bank. Whenever she gets money she puts some of it in the piggy bank.

It will be bittersweet when we end the school year because I am going to miss her teacher very much. Hopefully we will still stay in touch.