I had my report card conference for Bunny and Lila yesterday and pretty much everything looks great!Bunny is on grade level for everything. Her struggles are over and her participation is great. Last year she had a difficult time mastering new concepts in math, but this year she's really doing well. The one thing that she struggles with is recognizing sight words in text. For instance, if you sit down with her and say, "let's work on sight words," she's able to name them all for you or tell you how to spell them. But when she's reading a text she doesn't recognize them. I think that this will come with practice.
Lila is on grade level or above grade level in every way. She is excelling as a reader and is able to sound pretty much everything out. Sometimes I don't know what Lila is able to do. Things come very easily to her and she quietly absorbs a lot of information. She's never like, "LOOK WHAT I CAN DO..." She just knows how to do it and when I realize it, I'm shocked. So, I was shocked to see the journal that she keeps in school and all of the entries that she writes without help.
On the down side, her teacher spent most of the conference speaking with me about her speech and feels that this is an appropriate time to seek out an evaluation from a speech therapist. I was really surprised. I've always thought that Lila's speech was cute. She has always spoken with a southern accent. Think Georgia. She adds syllables to words and draws out the vowel sounds. Like, the word "more" becomes, "mo-rah" and scoops up at the end. Think, Blanche from the Golden Girls. Every word that ends in "er" is pronounced with an "or." So, sister is sist-ore.
Her teacher said that it was extraordinary that it hasn't effected her learning yet. But he also thinks that it will if we don't address it.
So... looks like it's time to find a speech therapist.
YaY Holler Girls!
ReplyDeleteI get to go over Katelyn's first report card when up in WA, we're both excited!
As for sight words and bunny, here is a little story for you - When designing lesson plans, I thought that sight words would be the easiest thing for kids because it seemed so for me. I planned a lesson based solely on sight words that i thought was easy enough that everyone would be able to complete with some skill but appropriately challenging so that those with higher skills wouldn't be bored. this was for FOURTH graders and the success rate was low, it was an epic fail on my part, but i learned something from it. just keep working on it and she'll do great!
i wanted to say something about her participation. i am super glad her troubles have subsided, i think that a lot was going on with FL, arm, bed bugs, etc., so there was situational anxiety there. i can only speak for myself so this may be related to something other than anxiety, but i can go through bouts of no participation, appropriate level of participation and too much participation to the point of being called out by teachers for talking too much. i would just keep an eye on her participating and make sure it's fairly consistent =) glad she's doing well.
as for lila, i never thought she had speech issues. and i have worked with a lot of kids, some of who have had speech issues, some who just need time to grow into their pronunciation or drop their stutter. but i am not her teacher who sees her everyday and seems to show legitimate concern. i would do a consult at least and see what a speech therapist says. better catch these things earlier than later.
glad everything is well. love!
Thanks Nikkol!
ReplyDeleteI'm not too worried about Lila. She will be okay. I will definitely take her for an evaluation to see what they say though.
It's funny, I worry SO MUCH about Bunny, but I never worry about Lila.
ps.
ReplyDeleteShe was gazing at a picture of my friend talissa online tonight (something that she always likes to do becuase she feels Talissa is very sophisticated, both in name and beauty) and she said "Denahvah" instead of Denver. So, Denver had three syllables. Den-ah-vah...