Remember back in September I told you about how Rick asked if Mallory’s conferences were the week of Ohio State?
Well, that week is here, and we had conferences yesterday.
This is going to sound like a braggy post, and I’m not going to apologize for it. I don’t know if kindergarten teachers just aren’t supposed to give negative feedback, or if Mallory is just *that good*. I kept waiting to hear “she’s really cute/smart/whatever, but…”. But we never heard anything bad.
I guess Mallory had a rough go at the beginning of the school year. Apparently she wasn’t very interested in following the rules, and didn’t participate when the teacher was trying to see what letters and numbers she knew. So apparently the teacher thought she’d have a lot of work to do with Mallory…until a couple of weeks later when Mallory knew all of her letters and numbers and the teacher realized that Mallory is either a fast learner or she was just pretending to not know them when the teacher asked at the beginning of the year (the case being the latter…). But now Mallory is doing SUPER GREAT and is really smart and beyond where she needs to be with her letters. She messed when the teacher was quizzing her to identify numbers 1-20 (she said 80 for 18), but apparently she is only supposed to be able to recognize up to 10 (and we know she can recognize numbers up to 100…anything Mallory sees with a number on it results in her yelling out what the number is).
The teacher made a couple of comments about “because she (Mallory) is younger” with regard to the not telling the teacher she knew all the letters, and with maybe having a hard time transitioning at the beginning of the school year, and as a reason for maybe why Mallory started crying during the Thankfulness Celebration thing the kids put on last week. I asked the teacher if Mallory was going to have that handicap for her entire school career, since that was one of our worries about sending her to school this year. She apologized for bringing it up and didn’t mean for it to be a negative thing, but just an observation and that maybe Mallory has a hard time with transitions (which then I was about to say “but she’s never had a problem with transitions!” until I remembered that she was at the same school for her whole school career until kindergarten).
Rick & I did have a concern about Mallory’s dilly-dallying; she tends to get distracted very easily and it seems as though her classwork comes home half-finished a lot. The teacher assured us that Mallory not finishing her work isn’t because she gets “off-task”, but more that she is a very careful draw-er and really takes her time doing her work.
I also wanted to know if she was as bossy at school as she is at home. The teacher paused and said “um…I’d say she’s confident…she wouldn’t get away with bossy with this group of kids, but she is confident and sticks up for herself.” She also told us that Mallory plays with boys and girls, but because Mallory really enjoys crafts and drawing, she has made a natural connection with the other girls who like to do crafts and drawing, and is in with the “art crew”.
And the teacher also told us that Mallory has a wonderful sense of humor and shared a story about how Mallory told them she went to a football game at Chicago but wasn’t going to go to the one against the Sparties because she doesn’t LIKE the Sparties. But when the teacher pointed out that Mallory went to Chicago for a game, Mallory said super-matter-of-factly “well, Chicago is COOLER!”. (Good point Mal – but most places we’d visit are cooler than East Lansing.) The teacher also said that in the classroom everyone has decided that in the interest of friendship or whatever, the class will like both teams (Michigan and Michigan State). Except Mallory. Oops.
But the best part was when I was waiting for our turn and got to flip through some of the books they’ve put together of the kids’ work.
A few observations:
- Mallory is very tan in this picture.
- Mallory finally got the straight hair she wants.
- When has my daughter ever eaten a 5-scoop ice cream cone?
