Teacher conferences

Mayhem can read and Havoc is a wiggler.

That is the short summary of our parent teacher conferences.

I suspected Mayhem could read as a result of his report card but I had no frame of reference for those numbers. His teacher showed me the actual test he was given. He got 25 of the basic letter sounds right, he got all the blends but CH, read all the words on the semester 1 part & correctly spelled 6 of 7 short vowel sound words, missing only SIT, spelling it SET. He did so well she gave him the second semester set of words and he read half of them.

And he has had us convinced that he can only read STOP, ON, OFF and THE (apart from words like Chili’s, Kraft & Pepsi). So we will be doing far more encouraging him to sound out words than we have been when we read together & have higher expectations than we have had of the results. We haven’t really had any expectations actually but now we have a baseline so we can go from here.

Havoc is doing well academically. Apparently he respects the class rules enough that his clowning around is kept to a minimum though he has trouble sitting still. If there is a chance for him to stand next his seat rather than sit in (like when they are working on a craft project) he will be standing. He also often takes longer than the other kids to complete assignments both because he can be over elaborate in their execution & he takes awhile getting around to starting them. He doesn’t just color in someone's shirt red. It’s red with a complex blue & green triangle pattern. His 3 sentence summary of a book can be 40 words long because he wants it to fully summarize the story. He’s also a dawdler. He takes forever to get the assignment started & still wants to be elaborate in the answer. We’ve been dealing with this trait since he was 2. I used to time him putting on his shoes because he could find reasons to put it off or finish doing it and take a full 7 minutes to complete the task.  We also need to work on him sounding out unfamiliar words. He makes a guess and moves on. Such as the word  ‘combos’ he says “Columbus” we say no sound it out and he says “Christopher” because he won’t actually look at the word again but sticks with the theme of the first guess.

We will be working on Mayhem’s reading and encouraging Havoc to order his priorities better over the next six weeks.

They both have friends and seem to get along with well with others though apparently some kids are starting to tease Havoc about his glasses. He doesn’t get why people think it is funny but doesn’t seem very perturbed by it yet. I said if he is bothered he should tell them they lack imagination. Glasses are too easy.  (because that’s what I did & it seemed to work). Mayhem is something of a sexist with very clear ideas of what is girl stuff, though a bit nebulous on what is boy stuff. Girls can do boys stuff according to him but boys do not do girls stuff, like play Barbie princesses. I said“well what about taking care of babies?’ and he said “babies aren’t girl stuff, they are everyone stuff” So I think I am going to leave that one be for now.

Overall everything looks good for both of them. I hope it stays that way.