Abigail's Updates

There are lots of new things to report for Abbie. First, her well-child check up in October revealed that she now weighs 54.8 pounds (37th percentile) and is 49.5 inches tall (29th percentile), which is half an inch shorter than last year, I believe, so clearly there is some measurement error someplace. :)

Abbie had another good Halloween this year as the grim reaper. She ran into her friend Ava out on the trick-or-treat "trail" and the girls spent the night running around the neighborhood, having all sorts of fun.

As you can see the face coverings had to come off, as there was all sorts of candy and BBQ to be eaten at the neighborhood block party. :)

This week was also the fall parent-teacher conference at Abbie's school. The kids are evaluated on their communication skills & social development, individual work habits, and academic performance. This time around, Abbie's strengths are her contributions to group lessons, her clear and confident speech, her ability to complete her goals when sitting in a successful workplace (i.e., not next to a distracting friend), and her ability plan her work goals and strive towards those goals most of the time (she had some coaching on this earlier this fall, which has helped). Academically, they noted her creative writing skills, her reading comprehension skills, her proper use of writing mechanics, and her ability to accurately use the Montessori materials as her strengths.

As for areas for growth, Abbie needs to work on using appropriate volume for the situation (i.e., sometimes a little less volume), she needs to continue to strengthen her planning and completion of work, she needs to do more than just the bare minimum required on an assignment (i.e., for some kids a 3 paragraph essay would be great, but for Abbie they expect more than this), and she needs to continue solidifying her fast recall of multiplication facts so that she can move on to her division facts (automating math facts is a big deal in Montessori). So, all in all, she is doing well, and I think that the skills that they are working on with her are good lifelong time management skills. Further, I think they are really working hard to stimulate the kids' internal motivation to learn and to complete tasks, so that is all good stuff. :)