Parent/Teacher conference

We recently had our second parent/teacher conference at Gray's pre-K. We absolutely love his teacher and I think she may have a soft spot for our boy too.

She has each student do a series of exercises that were also completed last fall when we had our first parent/teacher conference. It's really fun to see how Grayson has progressed.

Here's one example. She read the class the Three Billy Goats Gruff book and asked them to draw a scene from the story.

This was Gray's picture last November. Quite elaborate and pretty good recall of the story, but it's really just scribbles until the teacher asked him what each thing was so she could label it. 

This spring he opted for a simpler scene, but with more detail. This is a big billy goat on a mountain. 

On this one he was asked to write his name and draw a picture of himself. Apparently in the fall he didn't have a torso, just legs coming from his head. 

This time around it actually looks like a boy. I asked him if the line between his eyes was an eyebrow and he said it was his forehead. 

She also has them do a worksheet identifying shapes, numbers and letters, plus completing a simple letter pattern and a story problem. He got everything right except when it came to identifying letters. He only recognized about half of the alphabet and they really want you to ID all of them by the time you get to kindergarten.

With Gray's late interest in wanting to learn how to write, I'm not surprised he's a little behind on letter recognition too. She gave us some ways to help him catch up, so we've been doing exercises each evening that are disguised as games. During this time, I've realized he likes to sometimes write with his left hand and can actually do so fairly well even though he mostly uses right. I don't correct him so we'll see where that goes.

We also talked with his teacher about Gray's attention span. I've noticed that there's times he knows the answer to questions, but is distracted by something or wants to go play so he just says he doesn't know in hopes we'll move on quickly. She wasn't as concerned by this yet since this tends to be a boy trait and he's young compared to the other students. I guess it's just something we'll watch and work on.

Overall, the teacher was very complimentary of Gray and talked about the funny things he says and how well-behaved he is in class. She thinks he's definitely ready to move on to kindergarten and we're both hoping he'll get her twin sister as his kindergarten teacher.

I can't believe there are only two months left of pre-K! We've already completed our kindergarten paperwork and I know the rest of the school year will continue to fly by.