Conferences!

This week the kids have conferences. At Horizons, this means each child has an hour to "present" their work to their parents. Guided by their teacher, the child prepares writing samples, math work, book reviews, art, Spanish, poetry etc. At the Kindergarten level, it's mostly the teacher gently urging the child to read, play a math game, etc., but by 3rd grade, it's all them!
Ted had a great conference. His work has certainly improved in the last few months. His writing is neat and beautiful (not all the time, but in his "edited" work), his math is spot-on (when he takes the time to do the problem carefully), and his reading is at the top of his grade level (taking into account that he began 2nd grade below grade level, he has advanced 3+ levels in under 2 years. Rock on.) We are going to have to keep him on it this summer. It's not hard to read every day (the library always does a neat Summer Reading program that we've done each year) and it should be fairly easy to do some writing each day too (a journal, a written response to a book we're reading, a letter to a family member) and math can be math games, which all my kids love. The challenge will be making time for it on camp days. Ted has 5 weeks of camp and the little ones have 3. There are only 8 weeks of summer vacation this year, so while that's sad to me that they're starting so early in August, at least they will have less time to forget what they've learned!
Sam is doing great in school, though he is very silly and needs to learn to reign that in. Heh.
Mae is also going great though we just found out today that she'll need glasses for the same reason Ted did: her eyes don't converge or track well at all. A summer of vision therapy and (adorable!) glasses for reading and computer, and she should be good to go by 2nd grade. Ted no longer needs his glasses, so I am a devout believer in Vision Therapy and the accompanying glasses. I'll have a pic of her with them as soon as we get them!
So, a summer plan for my kiddos ... should be fun!
(The pic is Sam' self-portrait. I love it!)