Self-Portraits

We had our Parent-Teacher conference today at preschool. The teacher gave us these: Matthew and James's self-portraits. I think they're awesome. :) They really do seem to capture something about them.

The teacher said she uses this task to assess persistence and focus -- apparently doing a "real" self-portrait is basically impossible for three-year-olds, so she wants to see how long they'll spend trying. She said Mattie and James both had great focus and persistence.

Overall, she said they were both doing wonderfully: they're kind, engaged in the class activities, and having fun.

We talked about James first.  She said he always participates 100%, and is a "go-getter kid" -- nothing deters him, he always has a can-do attitude.  (She also mentioned trying things on the playground that he's not quite big enough for yet -- yup, we know about that!)  She said he has a great vocabulary; his sentence structure is more limited, but correct.

She also repeated what she had told us before: one day when Mike picked the boys up, she commented that what James had done with the blocks that day was "extraordinary."  She explained what she meant when I was in the next time.  She said his skills at planning ahead to make his tower even with blocks of different sizes showed excellent multi-step planning, and then she asked him to 1) count the individual blocks, and then 2) count the levels, and he did both easily -- according to her, this is way beyond his age level (5 to 7 year old skill) and no one else in the class is doing that kind of thing.  (Go, James!)  She was very impressed, and thinks it demonstrates intelligence (and perhaps also the fact that his hearing loss makes him rely more on visual information).

She said that Mattie was very empathic and a caretaker.  :) The issue with him at the start of the year was that she had a hard time getting him to try to do things on his own -- he'd say, "I can't" and want her to do it for him.  But she says he's gotten much better and more confident, and has really blossomed over the last month or so.   She said he has excellent verbal skills (yep, we'd noticed) and very good memory for the things they've done in class.

She said the boys get along really well and and take care of each other and want to play with each other, so she has to separate them sometimes, especially when the education specialists are there to work with James.  (Quite a change from last year!) The boys resisted that at first but now go along with it.  The problem is that Matthew will answer for James, and James knows that and will sometimes just wait for Mattie to answer.  (Definitely not what we want!)  So Ms. S. doesn't let that happen ("I'm asking James right now, but I'll have a different question for you next, Matthew.")  The other thing is that when it's one of their turn, they think that it's both of their turn (e.g., to use playdoh or whatever).

She mentioned that it might be good to have them in separate classes next year (there are two four-year-old classes).  At this point, I'm not really in favor of that (unless we can't stop the "Matthew answering for James" problem), but we also don't have to decide that right away.

We also met with James's educational specialists today.  Overall he's doing well, talking a lot more, and they seem to really enjoy working with him.  They noted that he's still not speaking up to say when he can't hear something (either because of noise or because his hearing aids aren't working), and they also think that sometimes he doesn't answer questions because he doesn't want to be wrong -- so he just stays quiet instead of saying anything.

So, very informative and positive meetings!  We feel very fortunate to have such a fantastic teacher and great specialists working with the boys.