Thursday, May 1, 2008

Update From Parent Teacher Conference ...

I am happy and of course proud to report that Jade got a good review at school today and that they think she is more than ready to be going to Kindergarten.

The report written by her teachers Ms Cindy and Ms Leah read "Jade is not only a joy to Ms Leah and myself but to our entire school. She is smart, thoughtful and always has a song to sing. We will miss her, thank you for letting us here at ECA be a part of her life !"

She has mastered all the Social and Emotional Development steps set out by them as well as all the Skill Development steps and Physical Development steps.

The only thing under Fine and Gross Motor Skills that she did not master was to pump when swinging which I guess is our fault coz she doesn't have to do that, we have always just pushed her :-(

In her Cognitive and Language Development there were four things we need to master before she goes to Kindergarten, one was that she didn't recognize her last name when shown, neither could she write it. She knows it when asked but we have never really pushed her to write it and never thought about the recognition part so we will work on that. Also even though she knows she lives in Big Pine Drive, she doesn't know the number which I guess is really important so we need to push that, she knows that she lives in Matthews and in North Carolina but she doesn't know obviously the difference between the two so we need to teach her our address. She also knows our telephone number but because from the beginning we taught her the number without the code in front of it, she forgets that and needs to know that too so those are things we will definitely work on between now and the start of 'big' school.

She is definitely Left Handed, there is absolutely no doubt on that one !!! That being said, some sports that she attempts she does with both, it depends on how she sees others do it or how the teacher does it, so I have heard it's an advantage to be able to play sport with both hands, we will see :-)

With her colors, shapes, letters both uppercase and lowercase there were no problems, I guess they only need them to count up to 30 but she can go up to 100 and is working out how to go further from there ... She knows the days of the week and the months of the year but has a problem recognizing the word at this point so that's another thing we will work at during the Summer.

Even though I know Jade is excited to come home every week with the new word for that week, apparently she has done really well in class with these words, recognizing them and remembering them, so hopefully that will mean that reading will come easy for her, they have been doing basic reading at school and they have said there are no problems with Jade when it comes to that.

They need to know 3 Pledges at school, obviously the American Flag would be the one they would continue on with in Kindergarten but at ECA the Christian Flag and the Pledge to the Bible were just as important and although she knows the Christian Pledge she had a problem remembering the Bible Pledge :-(

They said Jade mixes well with everyone both class mates and teachers so they didn't' see any problems going forward and well they didn't need to tell us that Jade likes to sing, I always joke that she loves to sing but she is no future American Idol but they thought she sang pretty well, I still think she may land up being the song writer but not the singer (hehehe) but that's just me.

Now before I bore you all totally to death, I was very informative here because in SA the schooling is a little different and I wanted to pretty much give them the picture of what all the kids do here even before they go to school, I hope this helped.

Let me say it one last time ... I am a very proud mom today :-)

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