Samantha's first blog

Posted By pamelamyers on November 20, 2017

We had our fall parent-teacher conference today with Sam’s teacher. It went well, pretty much as expected. Sam’s reading is slightly above where she is supposed to be, which is great, and she knows 371 of the 400 sight words she is supposed to be able to recognize by year’s end, which is awesome! Her main issue in the “literacy” area, is that her handwriting is horrible (which we know) and she doesn’t seem to get that neatness reflects on the quality of her work. We talked to Mrs. Smith about it and she said if it was ok with us, she was going to start making Sam redo some of her work if it is not legible, she is not using punctuation, keeps using capital letters in the middle of words, that sort of thing. We were all for it! I think that after a few times of being made to redo things, it will get old, and hopefully that will be the push Sam needs to be more careful.

In math, she is struggling, as she did early last year, but she is getting better. Her scores have improved steadily on her three assessment tests.

We discussed Sam’s….lack of focus…shall we say. We have had this same discussion with every teacher since preschool. Sam can be a bit of a dreamer and sometimes has to be brought back down to earth with everyone else! I don’t like to see that as a bad thing, I mean, she is super creative, and I love that about her, but she has to mature a bit and realize that when she needs to pay attention, she needs to pay attention. Mrs. Smith thinks its just a maturity thing, taking education seriously, and that she’ll get there eventually. She checks in with Sam a lot during the day to make sure she is on the same page with everyone else, which is just what Sam needs. It is hard for me to deal with, her lack of enthusiasm for school and the lackadaisical way she goes into schoolwork and education. I was such a school nerd. I took everything waaaay to seriously and got great grades without trying very hard. But I think that’s the problem — I didn’t have to try hard, and Sam sometimes does. I have a hard time realizing that sometimes and that does not make me a great teacher. I am really working on being patient. I tell Sam all the time that if she just tries her best, that is all I want. The problem is, sometimes I don’t think she does try her best, even when she says she does. But, overall, she is a good student. We are very proud of her!

As a side note, as we were walking out, I noticed a bulletin board in the hallway filled with “spotter” cards. Kids at Scenic can be “spotted” by anyone for doing something special and get a “spotter” card. I think they are all entered into a sweepstakes thing at the end of the year or something. Anyway, Sam wanted one in the worst way. She told us a week or so ago that she got spotted, and today I saw her card. She’s a good kid. 🙂

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