School conference

Believe it or not, it's already parent-teacher conference time! I scheduled Addie's for last Friday, since I'll be out of town this week when they are actually being held. At 6:13am on Friday I get an email from her teacher saying, "we don't really 'need' to meet. You know how smart and wonderful your daughter is :) She's doing wonderfully both with transitioning into the classroom, and with her academics. It's up to you. I'll be in the classroom regardless."
Well, obviously, I know how smart and wonderful she is, but it's not the same to not hear it from the teacher herself, right? So of course I went in.
We started with going over the basic testing they did as a baseline the second week of school, to determine how many letters (uppercase and lowercase) each child can identify within one minute and how many numbers they can identify up to 100 (plus how high can they count). Addie knew all of her letters with 100% accuracy. She correctly identified most numbers to 100, and could count to 100 with no problem. She could make all of the rhyming sounds with no problem, etc. The only thing that she didn't know was the structure of a sentence. (I was quickly assured that they have covered that now and that Addie knows it. I agreed, saying "oh yes, we're really into putting periods at the end of sentences now, and capitalizing the first letter.)
We talked about her writing skills and how she is so into trying to correctly spell words. I joked about "hot" and "heart" and we talked about how right now she's encouraged to "write whatever sounds you hear," hence the total skipping of some syllables, etc. There is a four stage process to writing/comprehension and Addie is clearly in the 2nd stage, where she has sentences that have most of the sounds- all in the correct order- but still misses some whole sounds too. The next stage is to have almost all of the sounds written in the correct order, and then the final stage is phonetic sounds all down on paper. As Muddy explains, she's in her "texting" stage right now, where it's a shorthands of most of words. :) Anyway, her teacher thinks she'll be in the fourth stage by year's end.
She told me "we send kids to first grade with the skills that Addie has right now, and it's the beginning of the year." I knew that, but it's nice to hear too.
So then I put the academics aside, and said I wanted to make sure from the social justice standpoint that she is a good citizen and helper. Of course she is. She's very mother-henlike. She is purposely assign-seated next to the child who has the biggest needs. Her teacher said Addie takes the time to help explain things to him, because "he may not get what's going on at first, but when it's explained to him a few times he can participate" and doesn't jump the gun with interjecting help.
We talked about her big personality and her incredible sense of who she is and how the world works. Her teacher said she loves Addie's observations and what she has to say, because there aren't many kindergartners like her. She said, "I laugh a lot and it's entertaining to hear what comes out of her mouth." That immediately made me say, "Oh my God, she hasn't said anything inappropriate, has she?" Nope. Just her everyday observations and beliefs that each of her classmates thinks about things the same way she does.
A funny note is that her teacher said, "Did Addie tell you that I had to turn the cd player on the other day?" I was like, "no." She said, "phew. I was teaching them a song, and it's to the tune of Three Blind Mice, I kept trying to get it right and it just wasn't working, so I opted to put the cd on so they could hear it. And the whole time I'm thinking 'Oh no! Addie is going to go home and tell her parents I had to turn the cd on." I assured her that wasn't a big deal. She also said that she caught an episode of Glee a few weeks ago and wondered "Is Addie watching this right now?" I assured her that in working on increasing my Mommy-of-the-Year points, that since Addie started school she and Ben don't watch any tv during the week and are in bed by 8pm (really!!!! I know, I know, I know, you're all shocked- sometimes I am too!).
Overall, she's stellar, as I expected. There is a group of 4 students who are sort of the ambassadors of the classroom who academically/behaviorally are ahead of their peers. It's not surprising that Addie is in the group and I'm extremely happy that she's considered a peer-support person.