The week that was

What a busy week last week was.

Wednesday I had lunch with Dad & Janet at Hidden Secrets. Thursday morning I had coffee with the other year 1 mothers. The big event though was the school swimming sports on Friday.

Brent was in the 7 & 8 year olds 25m freestlye & the 25m backstroke. There were 8 boys in the races & Brent came 5th in the freestyle & 4th in the backstroke. He wasn't the only one who didn't jump or dive into the pool so that really wasn't a handicap for him. He did really well.

James was in the 5 year old backstroke & freestyle with 2 other boys. He had to wait a long time before his races & he was sitting sucking his thumb in his own little dreamland. So much in dreamland that he almost missed swimming in his freestlye race. He swam very well & came 3rd in both races.

On Sunday we went geocaching & found a couple of caches & found all the clues to get around to doing another cache.

Tuesday was the parent teacher interview. We had Brent's assessment first & Brent is doing really well. He is reading at the level of a 10 year old. His comprehension is also at the level of a 10year old. Miss Flynn was very impressed with his listening & he got 76% on that which apparently is up at a 10 year old level. His numeracy is not as bad as we thought, he is at level 4 which is what he has to be at at the beginning of year 4, so that is wonderful but there is still a lot of room for improvement in his basic facts. There also has to be some work made on his presentation & printing skills, so now he brings home a worksheet of letters to print out every night for homework. He is quite happy with it because yet again logic has worked with him & we said that if he prints neatly & correctly he gets to move to the next level, "linking", the start of writing in italics.

After such a good interview it was time for the one about James. We knew it wouldn't be good & Mrs Williams can't believe how like chalk & cheese the two boys are. James is apparently immature for his age & has distraction issues, in that he is easily distracted. Where we thought he was learning his words to read it would appear that he is not as he could only read one word in every sentence in the book. So we have to start trying to get him to learn one word a week, previously we were trying for 7 words in 2 weeks. This is going to be a very long & slow process. Mrs W has pinned him as having avoidance issues (I've been calling it lazy) & says that really we just have to tread lightly & slowly & hopefully everything will click in his brain soon. The good thing though is that despite his distracting behaviour & being easily distracted he actually isn't a bad boy. He doesn't fight & doesn't retaliate to anything thrown at him by the two bullies in his class. On that front it looks like the bullying situation has finally settled down & both those boys seem to have calmed down a lot.