Teacher, Teacher

Today I had Leon’s parent-teacher conferences with Ms Patty! She said he’s doing great academically – and she quickly added that he won’t hesitate to tell her if she gets something ‘wrong’. The example she gave was when she asked, “Basketball starts with… hmm… P?” And he immediately shot back with, “Ms Patty, basketball doesn’t start with P. That’s puh-puh-puh. Basketball starts with B, like buh-buh-buh. And also butterfly and balloon and…”

Truly like his mother’s son, she said he enjoys structure and rules. She said sometimes she even has him lead circle time, because he knows exactly what to do – and if they say the Pledge of Allegiance wrong, he’ll say, “Uh-uh, start over!”

She did mention Claudia by name, and said the two of them always play together but get on each other’s nerves; Leon will get frustrated that Claudia isn’t following the rules (“Ms Patty, Claudia isn’t using restaurant manners!”) and Claudia will get annoyed that Leon keeps telling her what to do. But she said whenever she tries to redirect them and have them do separate things, they get upset because they want to play together. 

She mentioned that sometimes she’ll notice that he’s isolating himself and not engaging with his friends. When she asks him what’s wrong, he’ll say something like, “[Friend] took a toy from me.” So she’s trying to prompt him to communicate a little more. This goes hand-in-hand with us trying to convince him to speak up if he’s hungry and needs an extra serving, rather than starving all day until he gets home (and then eating nonstop until he goes to bed).

She also said he’s doing great with his art. She said he’ll draw scenes where she can clearly tell what he says is happening in the picture, and he’ll often try to draw from something else as a reference. When I told her I spend a decent amount of time making photorealistic drawings from reference photos, she didn’t seem surprised and actually said that makes a lot of sense.

All in all, nothing surprising!