We had our first Kindergarten parent teacher conference this morning. It was nice to chat with his teacher. No surprises, of course. We asked about the reading testing they did awhile ago and she said that “he can word read anything you give him” but apparently his comprehension isn’t quite as advanced. I think she said they tested around a 2nd grade level and he could read it, but needed work on the comprehension. We also talked a bit about how it’s hard to tell with him sometimes because he often just doesn’t want to answer questions and it’s hard to tell if he doesn’t know or just doesn’t want to talk. Or maybe some of both.

Overall she said he is a great kid to have in class. Of course!

We had an interesting interaction in the hallway as we were rushing to the meeting, late of course. There is a counselor who teaches Second Step to the kids. She probably does other stuff as well, but Lex calls her the Second Step Teacher. Second Step is a program that teaches kids social and emotional skills to help them succeed at school. She said good morning to Lex in the hallway and he looked away. It was early and he was feeling nervous about the parent teacher conference (more importantly about whether he wanted to sit in the hallway or play outside with some other students). She paused and said it again, he looked away again. Then she got down right at his level and made eye contact and tried to prompt him on the right way to reply. He kept looking at me and his eyes started to well up. Silly boy. She made me laugh when she said “Ok, let’s try this again,” and she stood up, whirled around, looked at him again and said good morning. He smiled and gave her a little wave. She said, “Ok, I guess we’ll keep working on that one!” It was nice to see that people are working with him on his eye contact aversions and nice to see that she was so nice about it. I think on a different day he would have been much more receptive to her. Anyway, overall it was a nice morning at school :)