(no subject)
Well, the teacher workday today was going to be an excuse to do something with my son on a gorgeous day. Sadly, he has developed a bad cough, and so we are staying home quietly, except to vote and to see if he left his uniform pants at TKD (don't ask). I have made him a cup of Raspberry Zinger tea with Bee Folks honey (so that, unlike the cheap supermarket stuff, I know it's actually honey).
OTOH, my parent-teacher conference yesterday went well. I continue to like his teacher, who has a realistic idea of how much a little boy can be expected to sit still, and sensible goals for him moving forward. I saw his journal, which amused me - he begins to write his sentences Very Carefully, placing each letter and spacing each word, and then the sheer joy of writing comes upon him (or else he doesn't know how to spell something and doesn't bother to ask) and he writes a stream of random letters. For example, "I like to play Megaman X7. It is sometimes hard." comes out as"I like to play MAgaMannex seeven it iashfomgnbvbzeit". (His teacher asks him what he meant after each session, and writes translations underneath.) She says he's quite confident about his assignments, plunging ahead without asking for too much guidance (a trait with its good and its bad aspects, I suppose), and that when his right hand was injured, he just went ahead and did his best with his left, without protest or "I can'ts," which pleases me. Needs to learn to manage his personal space better, improve his turntaking and not-throwing-fusses-about-losing in games, which I am not surprised by. (I gave her Master Lightfoot's three rules of gameplaying to use on him - "Always do your best, always be a good sport, always have fun.") He is, however, apparently progressing well enough, and I can tell his reading is improving.
In the car on the way to the library, he was playing with a NASA puzzle book a preschool classmate had gotten for them (her mom works for NASA), and was doing a crossword - spelling out the clues to me, while I encouraged him to sound out the words, figuring out the answers (mostly on his own there), and spelling them into the chart, with me helping him sound out which letters went where. He did pretty well, better than he would have before the school year started, though I needed to tell him a few words (like "Earth," which is confusing because of the double vowels). But I was proud when he sounded out, "It keeps us on Earth", and then immediately piped up, "Gravity!" And spelled it, too, with only a bit of confusion on the final "y".
OTOH, my parent-teacher conference yesterday went well. I continue to like his teacher, who has a realistic idea of how much a little boy can be expected to sit still, and sensible goals for him moving forward. I saw his journal, which amused me - he begins to write his sentences Very Carefully, placing each letter and spacing each word, and then the sheer joy of writing comes upon him (or else he doesn't know how to spell something and doesn't bother to ask) and he writes a stream of random letters. For example, "I like to play Megaman X7. It is sometimes hard." comes out as"I like to play MAgaMannex seeven it iashfomgnbvbzeit". (His teacher asks him what he meant after each session, and writes translations underneath.) She says he's quite confident about his assignments, plunging ahead without asking for too much guidance (a trait with its good and its bad aspects, I suppose), and that when his right hand was injured, he just went ahead and did his best with his left, without protest or "I can'ts," which pleases me. Needs to learn to manage his personal space better, improve his turntaking and not-throwing-fusses-about-losing in games, which I am not surprised by. (I gave her Master Lightfoot's three rules of gameplaying to use on him - "Always do your best, always be a good sport, always have fun.") He is, however, apparently progressing well enough, and I can tell his reading is improving.
In the car on the way to the library, he was playing with a NASA puzzle book a preschool classmate had gotten for them (her mom works for NASA), and was doing a crossword - spelling out the clues to me, while I encouraged him to sound out the words, figuring out the answers (mostly on his own there), and spelling them into the chart, with me helping him sound out which letters went where. He did pretty well, better than he would have before the school year started, though I needed to tell him a few words (like "Earth," which is confusing because of the double vowels). But I was proud when he sounded out, "It keeps us on Earth", and then immediately piped up, "Gravity!" And spelled it, too, with only a bit of confusion on the final "y".