Monday, June 25, 2018

School Days - Grade 1 Edition

I cannot believe the last day of school is this week!!

We were wondering how E would do in Grade 1 since he had a few challenges with reading and writing in SK.  We knew the class would be more structured than he was used to and we didn't know if that would be a good thing or not.  I would say he had a successful year.

E participated in whatever activity he could.  He volunteered as an Enviro Rep for his class, he ran in the cross country race, and he participated in the lunch time chess class for one session.   He is very comfortable at school, has lots of friends, knows the teachers, and has a lot of fun. 

His teacher was great, she has been a teacher for many years and you can tell she enjoys working with the younger grades.  She had lots of patience for E.  We met with her within the first couple weeks of school, and then a few other times when he got his report cards.  Her comments were that he was coming along with his work and is a pleasure to have in class.  She said there would be the odd time that he is overly excited and could be rolling around on the floor or something, but was never mean or rude, just silly.  He is also very quick to help out his friends, she said almost to a fault because he tends to dive right in and start doing the task for someone rather than asking if they would like some help.  

His class did dictation tests every Thursday in the second term and E surprised me with how well he did.  We helped him practice his words and although there was the occasional struggle, he was mostly very diligent with writing them out, and if we asked him one in the car, he was able to spell it out loud.  We reinforced that it was a good feeling to get a good mark on the test, and one time when he got 5 out of 9 (a week when we didn't practice as much), he realized that he didn't like not doing well.  He wasn't upset but he put in the work for the last few tests and got good marks on those.  I enjoyed seeing the work he brought home and the increased detail and colour in his drawings.  

We still need to work on helping him with his school work.  Although he did a lot more written work in class, he is still behind on reading (in both English and French), makes some lazy silly mistakes with forming his letters and numbers, and tends to doodle in the white space of the work sheets.  This summer we will hopefully have some more time in the evenings to work on his reading and writing.  He got a curriculum book for Christmas and we worked on it for a few months but then got out of the habit.  I think if we keep using his reading app and doing the book on a regular basis, we can help him get ready for Grade 2.  I don't know who the teachers are for next year but we will hope for a good one!


Overall he is a really good and happy kid and although he could still work on his listening, paying attention to instructions, and then focusing on the task at hand, I can see a big improvement year after year, and I know he will continue to grow and get better at these things.  He's figuring what he needs to do and when he puts his mind to something he is usually pretty successful.  Bring on Grade 2!!


I wrote about Senior Kindergarten here and Junior Kindergarten here.

1 comment:

  1. Such a big boy who's grown so much this year! You should be so proud!

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