Well - I had a great conference with my daughter’s teacher - she had very lovely things to say about my little one! And she completely explained the TOPS Reports to me as well as the Accelerated Reader Program - and let me tell you - that program is awesome! I really like it!

They start out the year assessing each child’s reading level - which is really cool to know. My daughter is in the fourth grade and she tested at 5.9 or 5.2 - which would mean either 5th grade, 9th month or 5th grade, 2nd month. We talked about a lot of different numbers - so I got them a little confused, that’s why I am not sure which one - but noone has ever told me exactly where my children’s reading levels are at before - so I thought that was really cool!

I wish I could get my boys tested to see where they would fall.

All in all, it sounds like a great program and she gave me some good ideas for working on comprehension with my daughter at home.

And sometimes getting my kids to do schoolwork, especially extra stuff that the teacher didn’t specifically assign, but, they need to brush up on - can be tough.

But I ran into a blog today that has some great tips for dealing with that - it is Aurelia Williams’ blog, and you can find the post here: Tips to Stop the Homework Battle in Your House.

GO READ A BOOK!

Well, I’m off to the elementary school this morning to talk with my daughter’s teacher.  My daughter seems to be struggling with reading comprehension again - a bit rusty from our complicated and chaotic ‘moving’ summer during which we had no time to do ‘home-school-summer-work’ like we normally do.  

We definitely spent plenty of time reading, but, we never really ‘talked’ about our reading.  

And, as you know, we’ve moved from Texas to Alabama, and they have something new and different to us here called TOPS Report testing on books that they’ve read.  It is part of the Accelerated Reader program, which we didn’t not have in Texas.  And my daughter is having some low scores on them - so the teacher is going to explain the testing to me and give me some pointers on how best to work with her.

This will be my first Alabama teacher conference, and if my daughter’s lovely teacher wasn’t so darn sweet, I might be a little a nervous.  This is, however, my first time to venture up to the school during the school day - so that might be a bit nerve-wracking.  I have normally by now fully integrated myself into the school-helping-moms community, but, I have been so busy at home with My Very Own Mail, that I haven’t had time to do that yet.

So, I will come back and let you know how it went later today - these TOPS Reports could just be the coolest things and I might have to rush home to tell you all about them!

GO READ A BOOK!