Parent Teacher Conferences

We met with Justin's teacher shortly after he started preschool to discuss some concerns but yesterday I attended my first official parent teacher conference.

Every morning J takes off his coat, hangs it in his locker and closes the locker and happily sings the good morning song with his classmates. Since he sings louder than anyone else his teacher asked if his hearing is okay. He's had numerous appointments and his last one, which was when he turned 3, came back normal so they told us that he didn't need to be checked again until he turns 5. But since his teacher mentioned it and hearing obviously impacts his speech I think I'm going to schedule an appointment.

J is a wiz at puzzles and completes them really quickly. J knows his shapes, colors, letters and numbers and recognizes numbers and letters out of order. But one concern is that when he's counting and gets to 14, 17 and 18 he leaves off the 1 in front of them and then will continue counting. He also knows the months of the year and the days of the week; I was shocked and proud when I heard that. J also loves music time and playing on the computer.

The biggest concern is J's speech. Although J is starting to use more 3 and 4 word phrases he still doesn't communicate in sentences and continues to use gestures. But his teacher wasn't overly worried about it because he has a wide vocabulary. She also mentioned that he loves singing songs and clearly sings all the words to songs in class but for some reason he doesn't want to communicate via regular conversations.

But we've already found a speech pathologist who will come to the house twice a week during the summer to work with J so hopefully he'll be talking our ears off in no time. The only other concern, well not really because this is his first year of preschool so the teacher isn't focused on writing just yet, but she asked that we work with him on holding a crayon and tracing shapes and letters.

So overall Justin, affectionately called Mr. Justin by his teacher, is adjusting well and walks around like he owns the school which is funny because 1) he doesn't look like he's even old enough to be in school and 2) he's the tiniest kid in his class. But I'm really happy that he loves school, his teacher and the teacher's aid.