He Works Hard! & Maybe Some Potty Progress?

He Works Hard!
We had Luke's second parent-teacher conference this week and he's doing very well! My first question was his multi-tasking and if he has improved... at his first conference Mrs. M told us that Luke loves to sing and sings while he is working. Sometimes he would get so involved in his song that he forgot the project he was working on and then when Mrs. M said it was time to move on to the next thing, he was still working on the first project. She said he has really improved and can now sing WHILE working! She then told us that he works very hard and wants to get things right; sometimes he takes longer than the other kids to complete the task, but he would rather finish it without rushing instead of move on to the next project. Mrs. M said this is just fine with her (she's very flexible and understands all kids are different! we really like her) and she isn't concerned as long as Luke is okay with it.

He can recognize all of his upper-case letters and all but "y" of the lower-case - Mrs. M said they haven't learned "y" yet. :-) He has taken off with learning the letter sounds and does really well sounding out words and reading them. As for math, he can write his numbers up to 20, then when he got to 21 of Mrs. M's assessment he turned the "2" into a "5", but he understood the pattern of counting by 10s. He can also read graphs very well - my reaction to that was, "He can read GRAPHS? I didn't know they learned graphs in kindergarten!" Mrs. M said yes, the kids are learning so much more than when we were in kindergarten.

One of Mrs. M's assessments was she read a sentence to Luke and his challenge was to write the sentence. Luke wrote the first half of it correctly, but he wrote the words as a list, not as a sentence. He didn't write the second half of the sentence and Mrs. M thinks it's because they haven't learned those words. She then read a second sentence to him and he wrote all of the words (not all spelled correctly but spelled how they sound, which is fine) and again he wrote them in a list and BACKWARDS. Mrs. M thought is was cute that he wrote "We" as "iieW." For those of you with a Wii game system you'll get it. :-) He wrote We and added the Nintendo spelling, too. Mrs. M showed his work to the other kindergarten teachers and none of them had seen a student write this exercise as a list, either, or written the words backwards. Mrs. M isn't concerned about it, she just found it very interesting and said that sometimes when a student is concentrating on one aspect of the task (figuring out how to spell a word) they will digress on another aspect (writing the letters in reverse order).

Mrs. M is working on Luke's socialization; he has a couple of really good friends who he always plays with, which is fine, but she wants to make sure he interacts with all of the kids so he learns how to get along with all types of children. He has some goals to reach before the end of the year but he is still right where he should be and even ahead of the curve in some areas. We're very proud of him. :-)

This week we signed Luke up for summer t-ball and signed both of the kids up for swim lessons that will start in April. We will be busy but it should be fun! We also had an offer from our friend Jessica R. to watch Luke over the summer! Her daughter, Lauren, and Luke went to Ms. Louise's for a couple of years together and they're going to move to NL in a few weeks! We are thrilled that our friends will be just a minute drive away from us and we can walk to their house! We already have plans for Luke and Lauren to take swim lessons and do library activities... Jessica is a teacher and very creative so it will be perfect for Luke! It will be nice for him to be in a comfortable home with just a few kids instead of at a camp with lots of kids. It might be more relaxing for him.

Potty Progress?
This morning Audrey went on the potty and told Ben that she is not going to pee in her diaper anymore. Woo-hoo! I asked if she would like to take her potty ring to Ms. Louise's and she said yes. Audrey has a fear of falling in the toilet (this happened once, her bottom touched the water but Ben caught her), and Ms. Louise doesn't have a potty chair; I thought, well, duh, lets take her potty ring to school (for those who aren't in the potty training loop, it's a little padded toilet seat with handles that fits on top of the big toilet seat). As soon as we got to Louise's Audrey said she would go on the potty, so that's what Louise did first thing. Hopefully it was a success! Audrey's reward for not going in her diaper anymore is a "big girl bed." We have the bed and the bedding (a princess set), and she has seen both, but so far that hasn't been enough motivation! She has a lot of sassitude and I guess it just has to be her idea. :-)