Student Led Conference

Being new to Brooke's school this year, we didn't know what exactly a 'student led conference' was. It was scheduled for the Monday following Spring Break though and Brad was sure to take off work to check it out. I feel a little more 'in the know' b/c I seriously live at the school. But there are things I am not privy to on a regular basis. So it was fun to see what goes on.

We arrived at the front desk, Brooke came and got us and took us to a predetermined room where they had everything arranged. She had her folder with her agenda attached...

She got to pick the order of things to do and the top of her list was meeting with the teacher. Ha! Have I mentioned how much she loves her teacher?!?! Yea, she's all kinds of awesome.

So we met with the teacher first, got a rundown of her progress. Strongpoint = reading (duh!), weaker points = math. But more b/c she doesn't check her work or rushes. She's also not a very good test taker, so when while she gets the concepts and can do the work, she doesn't show it off as well. Still good (all A student after all), but if she had to list a weaker point...that's what it would be. We talked about science and social studies and all that good stuff too. Nothing bad was said. Of course.

Next on her agenda was refreshments. :P So she served us cookies and punch. :)

Then we went and did Fluency (we started going out of order at this point due to other kids taking longer in other areas). She had to show us how many phrases she could read in 1 minute. There's a stack of them. Goal by the end of first grade is something like 40-60? I'm not exactly sure, cuz she reads 140 words or something crazy like that. She did the whole stack with time to spare. :P

We went on to Writing, where she had to pick a picture and write a story on it.

I think its cool that all the kids have their own Writing Dictionary.. it has a list of common words then as they come across words they want to know how to spell, they ask the teacher for help and she writes it in their Dictionary. :)

Next was Science and Social Studies (no pics) and then on to Math. She chose the counting money game, which she did well at.

Then on to AR (advanced reading). Pfft! Do we even need to stop there?!? Ha. No, actually, it was kinda nice for Brad to see what we keep talking about. The books, the levels, the app and the tests, etc.. how it all works. So she read a quick little book, took a test on it, scored her points, all that. He enjoyed seeing it. Afterwards, we checked her word count. Here she's up to 851,000, but is now (as of the writing of this post) at 896,000 words. :O

Last but not least we, as parents, had to fill out a survey about how we liked the student led conference and then Brooke also had to fill out a kid survey about how she liked it!

It was a very cool experience for her and us!

PS - Also including in this post, a copy of her Spring school picture I promised. :)