Friday was Parent-Teacher conference day. Both teachers were really well-organized. They performed evaluations on the girls that gave us a lot of useful information. My first meeting was for Julia. She is wiggly at story time and doesn't appear to be paying attention most of the time. When her teacher calls on her to answer a question though, she nails it every time. She is also one of the only kids that participates in group time. Julia knows all her colors and shapes, can recognize some of her letters, drew an awesome self-portrait with a head, two arms, two legs, eyes, and a mouth, and was able to write her name (sort of)! Difficulties are recognizing numbers, picking up when asked, and pronounciation of some of her letters. Numbers are something we just haven't really worked on. I admitted that with me being in school, picking up the house is just not something we are very consistent about at home. Regarding her language, she is having difficulty pronouncing the "s", "sh", and "th" sounds. She had a free evaluation by a speech therapist at her school. Their assessment was simply that her conversational speech is difficult to understand." I tried to call and talk with them about it, but had to leave a message and no one called back. Meanwhile, I went to the Internet and stumbled upon a speech pathologist's website where I found the following table.
Based on this table, I think we are going to wait until she is four to see if we can see any improvement. At that point, we'll reassess the need for therapy.
Amelia's conference went well also. Apparently (while she is noticeably less wiggly than her sister at home) she is one of the more squirmy kids in the class also. Amelia also knows all her colors and shapes, can recognize some of her letters, drew a self-portrait including a head, neck, belly, arms, legs, feet, eyes, mouth, and hair (I'd never seen either of them draw a person before!), and was able to write some of her name (sort of)! Like her sister, Amelia was unable to recognize her numbers.
All-in-all, both girls are doing really well. They are currently really interested in learning to recognize letters and learning the sounds they make and love acting out the Bible stories they learn at school and church and the movies they watch. It's so fun to watch them play together in this way.
