More Parent/Teacher Conferences . . . Yawn

A trip to visit the girls' teachers tonight for regularly scheduled parent/teacher conferences resulted in reports quite similar to last time. I jokingly imply in this post's title that it's boring to hear the same ol' "great student, straight A's," etc., from each teacher, but Susan and I are really very proud of the girls and delighted to hear that they're doing so well in school. Some highlights:

Suzanna's teacher has her students write notes telling their parents how they think they're doing in school, and the teacher presents us with them when we arrive for the conferences. One of Suzanna's comments was that "language" is her best subject "because I love writing stories and talking correctly." With two English majors for parents, she surely gets enough grammar correcting at home--good thing she enjoys it! She's in 4th grade, and her reading level is 8th grade, 8th month ranging up to 9th grade, 3rd month.

Abigail's teacher is pleased with her contributions in class and continues to send her and a handful of other classmates regularly to an "enrichment" class with the gifted-and-talented teacher (something this same teacher did with Suzanna last year). Abigail's in 3rd grade, and her reading level is 5th grade, 2nd month ranging up to 6th grade.

Hillary's teacher is amazed at the way Hillary's mind works, seeing patterns in things in ways that her classmates don't--and in ways that surprise the teacher, too. Some literacy assessments show that she's above expected levels for 1st-graders in such areas as "nonsense word fluency" and "phoneme segmentation fluency," whatever they are. Her reading level is 3rd grade, 1st month ranging up to 3rd grade, 7th month.

Susan's dad was a dear and agreed not only to stay with the girls while Susan and I attended conferences but also to shuttle them to and fro their Tuesday night ballet classes. As a reward, we had him join us for supper after conferences: venison stew (using meat that he gave us from his own hunting expeditions) with lots of vegetables, hot biscuits drenched in butter and honey, and chocolate cake for dessert.