Report Card Day

Yesterday was report card day. Mustang’s teachers have worked in the past couple of weeks to prepare an IEP (Individual Education Plan) for her so that, in their words, she could be given marks reflective of the effort she is putting in. Her IEP focuses on reading, writing and math. With the IEP in place, she received very good marks – mostly Bs.

So far we have really focused at home on her reading skills. That is no doubt why her reading is approaching grade level. Her teachers say that whenever there’s a break in the work and she has a bit of “free time” or she’s done what’s expected, she’ll pull out a book and read. Yesterday she took to school the Magic Tree House #30 which she received as an Advent present on Sunday, because she wanted to get right at it. They view it as a good sign that she likes books and reading so much, despite still struggling with it. So do I.

It’s high time, though, I started working more on math with her. We’ve done occasional bits of review and practice, but nothing sustained or systematic, which is really what’s required.

The thing is that she already works so hard in school, I don’t want to overload her with work at home. If we do 20 minutes of reading, 10 minutes of typing, and 10 minutes of math every day, that’s a pretty heavy workload already for an 8-year-old. Add to that the school-issued homework – perhaps 10 minutes of spelling practice three or four nights a week, plus one page of language arts and two pages of math homework per week that we try to complete in two nights (so as to keep the weekend free of school-issued homework) – and it really adds up. (By mid-January I'm hoping that she will have good enough keyboarding skills that spelling practice and typing practice can be integrated at least in part.) But Mustang is beginning to recognize more and more that to make progress she will have to work harder than many other kids. But she still needs time just to be a kid and have fun.

As for Button, being in Kindergarten, he did not receive a report card this term. I will meet with his teacher on Thursday to discuss his progress, but no formal report card is prepared for Kindergartners until term 2.

Off-hand, I’d say he’s doing quite well. He’s recognizing letters and numbers, can count fairly reliably to 20 (though for some reason 15 if often dropped!), can do some basic addition counting on his fingers, has a pretty good number sense, is getting better at printing the letters and numbers, and likes to (pretend to) read.

When he’s playing on some of the kids’ websites on my computer, he’s quite capable of using the Favourites to get to some bookmarked sites, based on recognition of the first letter of the word or words that make up the shortcut and their position in the list.

And the other day, playing a number recognition math game on the kids’ computer (counting the number of balls on the screen and then clicking on the right number), he used a “short-cut” strategy to try to get the answer – if there were lots of balls on the screen he’d pick the biggest number first, rather than stop to count them. Unfortunately for him, this resulted in a lot of wrong answers (he’d pick 10 when there were really 9 balls, for example) – but I found it interesting that he already had the sense of large quantity relating to high numbers and knew which ones those were!