Kindergarten Conference

Parent-teacher conferences were last week, and the boys are doing very well.

James continues to be ahead of the game with reading and math.  He's in the highest reading group, but his teacher said that he's really sort of in a group of his own.  Her assessment was that he was reading at the end-of-first grade level.  (I suspect that may be an underestimate, but then again, I have no idea what elementary school reading levels look like.)  He's also way ahead of everyone else with his math skills, so she's trying to find ways to challenge him, and apparently they have some computer programs that can allow him to do things more at his own pace.  She mentioned that every day she says, "We have 180 days of school, and we've had X days -- how many days are left?" -- and all the kids look at James and he does the subtraction in his head and gives the answer.  :)  The kids were also apparently all very impressed at how well he did at Sushi Monster, an iPad math app.  One of the great things about kindergarten is that apparently it's still kind of cool to be good at math.  :)

The teacher had their gifted program teacher assess him, but apparently they're not actually supposed to test them until they're six.  So, he didn't qualify yet (partially because of his age), but his teacher thinks he will.

Matthew's math skills have also really taken a leap recently; he's much more comfortable with addition and subtraction than he was, and his teacher was impressed with the way he's thinking about math problems. The example that she gave was that she asked the kids what 8 minus 6 was, and then asked them how they got the answer.  Apparently most kids got the answer by counting on their fingers, but Matthew said, "I know that two plus six is eight, so eight minus six must be two."  So, he's demonstrating that higher-level understanding of the relationship between addition and subtraction.  The teacher said, "I hate to say it, but they have "common core" brains -- but in this case, that's a good thing!"  The Common Core is the new and controversial set of national standards, and one of the things they emphasize is that kind of problem-solving.

Mattie's reading is just a little ahead of grade level right now -- which was good to hear, because I feel like he could be doing better.  He's made a lot of progress and he's pretty good at sounding out words, but I feel like he hasn't quite made that breakthrough yet to it being a more fluent process.

The teacher also said they both have a great attitude and work hard, and that they both have an excellent vocabulary.  For both of them, writing/handwriting is the weak spot, but they've both made a ton of progress since the start of the year.