The flu hits Cedar Ridge

Well, Will is now in quarantine with the flu. He missed school yesterday and therefore missed his Math unit test and a spelling test.

Mrs. Ketchum had sent home some additional review for Will to go over in preparation for this test. Hopefully he will be better by Monday and can make it up then.

She emailed me about his timed multiplication quiz on Thursday. The 3rd graders are expected to be able to complete 30 problems in 3 minutes. Will was so proud to tell me he completed 38, "he thought". I asked him if he got them all right. He said he thought that he did. But, he kept going back to the fact that he got 38 of them done.

I reminded him that the number he got done is not as important as the number he got right. I just had a feeling he had a lot of mistakes.

Well, mom was wrong! He finished 34 of them and had 33 of them correct. The one he missed was 8x10. He put down 8, instead of 80.

I am so proud of him and he was proud of himself!

Conference Outcome

"We are seeing a lot of good effort" was the consensus from Will's teachers at our conference this morning.

Hmmmm.... What does that mean? He is trying a lot harder, but still not getting it? He is trying and seeing good results?

Well, it seems it is a mixed bag.

He is paying more attention and focusing more. He is asking more questions. It seems when he tries harder and puts more effort into his work the outcome is better. Not perfect, but better. That is good.

Both teachers seem pleased. He is making progress but it is a work in progress.

His reading teacher showed us some of his work from the Tom Edison book he just read in class. There were four ovals on the page and he was supposed to fill each one with four different happenings from the book. She suggested they go back and look at the chapter titles to remember what was in each chapter. So, he wrote a the title of each chapter in each oval. He then wrote a sentence about something that happened in each chapter.

Yep, a sentence. No detail. Nothing else but a sentence.

So, Event 1 read like this: Tom's First Experiment Tom tried to warm some eggs. Yep, that was it. Tom tried to warm some eggs. Will didn't say why he was trying to warm the eggs (to make them hatch), Will didn't say how he tried to warm the eggs. No, he didn't. Well, that answer was not good enough. No detail.

That pretty much describes how he filled in the other three ovals. He received an S- on this assignment. So, we brought it home and went over it. We had him give us more detail. I knew that he knew this stuff. He had been talking to me about this Tom Edison book. He was excited about it and enjoyed it. He even told me some of the stories. The full stories. The same stories he could only come up with one sentence to write about.

His teachers think, as do we, that he is trying to get away with doing his work in as little time and with as little effort as possible.

He has shown some evidence of spending more time on his math. He wants to get it right and is asking Mrs. K for her help. She is beginning to track whether he is having difficulty with oral instruction vs. written instruction. Just to track if there is a pattern or not. That will be interesting to find out about.

All in all it was a good conference. I think we are all pleased with the progress, yet agree that we have a ways to go...

Tomorrow is conference day

Will is off school tomorrow for conferences. Ours is at 10:50. We are taking Will to hang out with my dad during the conference. I am looking forward to it and curious to hear both teacher's reports.

Seemingly he is doing better. He is bringing home better grades. Though it sounds like, according to Will anyway, that he has had two days in the last week where he has had to stay inside and miss recess because of work he did not get done in math.

So... I am very curious to see what they have to say. Is he doing better because he is applying himself more? Is he doing better because he is being made to do better? Is he really doing better or does it just seem that way?

All questions I hope will be answered tomorrow.

He got an A, he got an A

OK- well, it was actually an A-, but who cares! It was a Third Grade Common Reading Assessment. These are practices for the OAT test he will take again in March.

The students are given a passage to read and then they are expected to answer questions about it. He did not do so hot on the last one of these. Come to find out that he had not gone back into the passage to find the answers.

Well this time he did! He only missed one question, the very last one. He told me that he did go back into the reading to find the answers which is awesome!

I am sooooo proud!

An S- and a 100

Those are the grades Will brought home from school yesterday on two different items.

He received the S- on some sort of Geography assignment in Ms. Rockett's class. He misspelled one word, did not capitalize Great Lakes and got two answers wrong. Hmpf! Unfortunately there was no note sent home with it, so I am not sure if this was a quiz of sorts or if he had the information in front of him and just had to pull the answers from it. I am guessing it was the latter. I meant to ask Will about it but he went to a friend's after school yesterday and I forgot to ask him this morning. I'll get to the bottom of it this afternoon.

I was so proud, as was he, to see the 100 on the reading assignment. It was two pages of comprehension questions from the book he just finished reading. He got them all right. But... he goes on to tell me that when he first turned it in he had skipped a question. Ok. Then he goes on to say that he turned it in, Ms. Rockett looked at it, made a funny face (as demonstrated by Will during this narrative) and then told him "I think you have every single one of these wrong but one". What?

So, I looked closer at this glorious 100 paper in front of me and I could see remnants of erased answers on every question. So, while he did get a 100 it is only because Ms. Rockett allowed him to go back and correct ALL of the wrong answers he had.

Why? Why? Why? Why did he have all the wrong answers? Why was he able to go back and correct them? Why is it that he obviously was able to find the right answers when made to go back, how on earth did he miss them in the first place?

Again I need to talk to him about this some more. I think it probably warrants an email to Ms. Rockett, too. It is so frustrating to me.

No consistency!

This picture shows about how I am feeling about all this snow! Crazy!

Another snow day today. We got to school both Monday and Tuesday this week, but then for some reason God decided we needed another 10 inches of snow. Ack!

Yesterday was the first day of Will's after school math class. It is an enrichment class taught by a 4th grade teacher. It is a male teacher, which Will has not experienced yet. Will was not very excited about taking this math class, but I convinced him to let me sign him up for it. OK- to be honest, I bribed him into taking it. I don't know if he even remembers that at this point. That was back during Christmas break!

Anyway, with all the excitement of the falling blizzard I didn't really get to hear much about his math class. He told me Mr. R yelled at some of the kids, told them they needed to be listening. He named the kids in the class that he knew. Beyond that I didn't hear much about it.

The description sounded wonderful. It promises he will grow in math confidence and learn to make number sense. So... hopefully we will see some improvement.

In his regular math class they are working on multiplication. Will is really excited about this and seems to be doing fairly well so far with it. We are going to start working on flash cards at home. Third graders are expected to know multiplication facts up to 50 by the end of the year.

With all of this inconsistency I am curious to see how our whole system is going to work with Will. Just as I posted in my last post, it will be interesting with all this time off to see how it comes together.