Parent Teacher Conferences

Whew. Two days of over 25 meetings with parents, as well as some of the regular busy work with the few children who came for daycare. Basically it's been busy.

The poor children who came for daycare were pretty confused as to where some of their classmates where. We take just a limited number on conferences days, most stay home with their parents, other family, or different daycare centers for the two days of conferences. So I had 11 children in the classroom for our shortened work period. Boy did it feel empty in there! On the other hand I could easily observe what they all were doing and we have never had more chairs being remembered to be pushed in! A little bit of extra recess, as well as time spent with the older elementary children definitely had our younger children deciding that daycare days are pretty great.

Lucky for me I not only got to spend time with the children, but sit in on quite a few conferences and see what their parents had to say. The head teacher and myself were pretty happy with all the rave  reviews we got from parents about how their children are doing. I know a lot of it is the environment, but I think sometimes the parents also aren't aware of how much their children are maturing as time goes on. ]
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Since I worked with most of these same kids before I took my Montessori training and then came back after a year I really had a unique opportunity to see just how many changes a year can bring. The children not only become more physically competent, but also much more socially aware and developed. I credit most of this to just maturing with age, as well as having the great support of their classroom community (not just the teacher) but it was nice to hear how grateful the parents were.

Funniest part of conferences:

Two parents came whose children were part of our daycare group. The parents kind of sneaked in to the classroom for their conference while their two young boys were in the other room with the daycare children. While I and the other teacher were talking to the parents this voice suddenly pipes up from the coat room, "Mommy here!" For some reason or other one of the boys had gone into the coat room, and most likely spotted his moms' jacket and deduced that she was in the building. We could all hear him trying to convince whatever adult he was with that he should go and find him mommy. Oh, and by the way he's using extremely simple sentences so she's interpreting what he's trying to say, adding to the entertainment. Meanwhile we're trying not to laugh and resume the conference, with his parents keeping their voices low so he won't hear them and get even more convinced that his mommy was here and that he should go find her. Luckily he was convinced that he didn't need to and went back into the other room so we could finish the conference and his parents could leave without a crying incident. Yeah, I'd rate than a success.

What were they thinking?

This blog comes in two parts today to answer the question, what were they thinking? Please enjoy in any order.

A child's story-

So I talked in an earlier post about how we have some job slips for the kids to draw at the end of the day so they can help tidy up the classroom. Now I don't expect them to get the job done perfectly, but every little bit does help. Usually it's great, the 'dust a shelf' job slips have been especially popular, which is great since dusting is pretty low on our teacher to do list and the children do a great job of it. Another job we have is 'check for dull pencils'. The child is supposed to pull the dull pencils out of the color coded holders and put them with the regular pencils to be sharpened. Well this is what I found today when I went to sharpen the pencils-

Now I'm not sure if the girl who checked the pencils just has really high standards for sharp pencils, didn't quite understand the word dull, or just really liked taking each pencil and placing it the big container. Either way, she did take out the dull pencils and they did get sharpened...so mission accomplished right?

An adult's story-

It was recess, I was spending the last half-hour of work playing four square with the few remaining elementary students (tough job isn't it?) when a car pulls up. A dad for one of the elementary students had arrived and the student quickly ran inside to get her lunch box and homework. Instead of just standing by the fence and waiting, the dad gets in line for four square and asks how to play. I don't know who was more shocked, the children who explained the rules to him, or his daughter when she came out and saw him playing with her friends. He stayed and played for a good 15 mins to her absolute delight. Four square isn't a hard game to learn or play, but when the area you are playing in is bigger it helps to have longer arms and legs. This student may have been one of the younger ones, but having dad there more than made up for the difference.

I still don't know why he decided to come and join our game, what he was thinking. But the elementary children were very impressed and stepped up their game to keep up with him.