We are all slowly getting used to Mitchell being in school all day. It has taken some adjustment for everyone, but he is doing very well!!! :) Macallan and Maverick still ask multiple times a day if it's time to meet him at the bus stop yet! They LOVE welcoming him home.
Maverick was actually taking a late nap this specific day, but I took a few cute pictures of Macallan welcoming Mitchell home.
We recently had Mitchell's parent-teacher conferences. They do "student lead" conferences at their school, meaning that the students attend with you. Mitchell really enjoyed showing us around his classroom and walking us through this notebook of projects that he had put together called his progress folio. He had a sample of project he had been working on in all of his different subjects like literacy, spelling, math, art, etc. At the front of the folio was a "goals" sheet where he listed one thing he thinks he does really well and one thing he'd like to set as a goal to improve upon. The thing he wrote down as doing very well was "spelling", which ironically wasn't spelled 100% right, but close! He really is a great speller for his young age! The thing he had decided he wanted to work on was "to be more active at recess." We got a little chuckle from that, but humored him and his teacher did too. It was very endearing to watch Mrs. Dobbs probe into this goal and try to help him think of ways to be more active, knowing full well that he is plenty active at recess :)
Mrs. Dobbs also listed something that she thought Mitchell was doing really well -- which was both his math and literacy skills. He is particularly excelling at math (accounting genes, anyone?!?!) Her goal for him was very typical for any 5 year old boy...more self control. Using inside voices when appropriate without reminders, listening instead of talking to neighbors, walking in line calmly, etc. We certainly weren't surprised by that one, but it was very interesting watching Mitchell's reaction as she said her few sentences. His eyes immediately welled up with tears and he began apologizing. :( Oh, he is such a classic case of "oldest child". He felt shame in not meeting her expectations for self control :( Honestly, I didn't predict that emotion from a 5 year old!
Jacob and I immediately ensured him that we were proud of him and his achievements. We ALL have things we need to work on and NO ONE is perfect.
It's honestly not our parenting goal to have perfectly well behaved children. We don't need our children to sit and stay on command because "I said so". It's our goal to instill a great values system in them while empowering them to use their own judgement, instead of fearing punishment. We want to encourage our children's unique personalities and skill sets to eventually to become confident, moral adults. We want to give them freedom to fail, and to learn from those situations to act differently next time....and although I would certainly not say that Mitchell is "failing" at anything, this was a great learning moment for all of us :)
We are very proud of our Kindergartner, and we shared that pride with him. His smile was beaming from one to cheek to the other as we shared a post-conference ice cream date with him :)
"Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things."
Robert Brault
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