I emailed Kwabena’s teacher yesterday to get an update on how he has been doing for the past 2 weeks, and here is what his teacher had to say (her spelling mistakes, unedited). Overall, good news, and nothing I didn’t already know (regarding his easy distractibility!):
Hello Mrs. Appiah,
We have had an excellent start to the school year. As I tell many parents Kindergarten at the beginning of the year is so hard for the children and myself in many different ways. The children come into school on some many different levels of academics and social behavior. The social behavior is the hardest one and takes the most patients and time (not a favorite for the students but ensure the most success later in the school year). For some of the children it is the first time they are in a school setting and the first time they have need to follow directions/rules. Since this is the case we spend A LOT of time going over appropriate classroom, hallway, lunch room and recess rules. We have established our classroom rules, we have discussed and practiced the Rules of the Road, and Ms. Murray (our PE teacher) has discussed the rules for recess. On Thursday we had a school wide assembly where Mrs. Brunson (our principal) discussed the school rules. In Social Studies we have and will continue to discuss rules and safety. We teach the children to behave the Cloverly Way. If you could please reinforce these rules at home would be greatly appreciated.
We start our fall reading testing on Monday to assess the students so we know how to place them into the best reading group to support their abilities. So by the end of next week we will collect our data and assign reading groups. That is when our instruction will begin to differentiate. The same will happen in math as well. We did do an informal assessment of letter recognition and sight words. Kwabena did very well. We will be working on having Kwabena start and complete activities independently. He can get distracted by others and other things in the classroom which doesn’t allow him to focus and completing his work. This is typical at this time since it is a new environment with some many new friends. We will continue to work on this. Kwabena has a great exciement for school and seems to be excited to have many friends. Hopefully the weather will stay nice so the children will have the opportunity to play outside and develop those friendships.
I hope this has been helpful and if you have any addition question please don’t hesitate to email, call or we could set up a conference. I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
Thank you,
Mrs. Garner
Kindergarten Teacher
Cloverly Elementary School
I was happy to hear that he’s got a great excitement for school and that he’s making lots of friends! Again, I wasn’t surprised to hear that he is easily distracted, because it was the same at Ms. Marilyn’s, as well as at home when we’re trying to get him to do assignments. I can only hope that he will continue to grow and learn how to focus more easily. And I’m not sure how much I should comment on his distractibility, because I don’t want him to be targeted in any negative way. But I also want her to know that it’s not a new issue with us, and that it’s probably not the new-ness of school, that it’s more of a “Kwabena” thing. Hmmmm……
I can’t wait to find out how he assesses in math and reading!!
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