A Great Report

Monday afternoon we had our first Parent Teacher conference for the year regarding Emily. Dave was able to get off work early so we could both attend and hear of her progress. Emily is doing very well in school. She absolutely loves to go. At the beginning of the year, she was immediately placed in the mainstream 1st grade class for Language/Vocabulary. She is doing well in the class and is also doing well with sounding out words which has helped her start to do simple reading. Her teacher also advised us that within her special ed class they have separate those kids who are progressing at a faster rate of learning from those who need more assistance while working on subjects such as math and additional language and vocab work. Emily is part of the more advanced group. There was a slight concern on her teacher's part regarding putting her into the mainstream class for math. Emily's special ed class is still completing some of the Kindergarten math book and the other class is already 100 some pages into the 1st grade math book. We reviewed the curriculum and the beginning of the book seems to be review of the past years learning but there is definitely an increase in math skills. We also learned that the 1st grade teacher has several methods of teaching addition and subtraction that Emily's special ed teacher thinks may cause some confusion to Emily seeing she has not been a part of that class from the beginning. After discussing all the points of this area, we made a unanimous decision that Emily would complete the work in the Kindergarten book with her special ed class and then be place in the mainstream class. This will happen the first week of December. We will monitor closely Emily's ability to grasp the material and determine if she needs to be brought back into the special ed class if she is struggling. We figure we will give her until the Christmas break to see how she does that way if she needs to come back into the small class it will be done after her vacation and she will still have time to readjust with a good part of the year left. Emily is doing very well in speech. She is also doing well in all her other non academic subjects. The only area of concern, which really isn't a concern is that she does need to be brought back into focus on occasion. Emily is our detail girl so when a story is being told, she will go off on tangents like wanting to give the cat in the story a name, a color, etc. Although, she does get distracted she is able to refocus quickly when she told to do so and does complete all of her work. It is an area that we feel is just a result of her "creative" personality but the teacher will keep an eye on it to make sure it does not become an issue. Emily is quite the little sociable girl - everyone knows Emily - that is so strange to say after her PreK experience. She loves to be silly and funny - kind of the class clown. We are so pleased with the program and especially the school she has been placed in. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers as the school year continues that she will do things to the best of her ability and for her future placement.