UGH Teacher Meetings Are Going To Be The Death Of Me!

So today was my second teacher meeting with Goddess and Handsome's teachers. Handsome's IEP meeting was last week and Goddess' parent/teacher meeting was today. Handsome and Goddess had to come to the meeting with me but they managed to do their homework and I was able to have a 30 minute meeting without any interruption. They are good kids.

Over the past few weeks, I have meet with, conferenced with and emailed both kid's teachers and we definitely work as a team to make sure the kids are getting exactly what they need. We are in a great school district for kids like mine who require additional services in school. Many of my long time readers know Handsome has been in Speech and Occupational Therapy since he is 3 and Goddess started reading classes last year. This year with the Common Core Curriculum school is much, much harder and there is a lot expected of the kids this year.

Handsome as brilliant as he is has been having difficulty in Science and Social Studies. It is new to him and because of the way he thinks, reading comprehension has always been difficult. He is a very literal thinker and he has problems reading outside the lines.

We have never done more homework as we have this year and as parents we spend about 2 hours with them doing homework almost nightly and that doesn't include studying.

When Handsome started having problems in Social Studies and Science we spent a lot of time doing flash cards. I would look through his school work and write tons and tons of index cards that eventually we moved on from and now I had wasted cards. You should see the zip locked pile of bags of cards I have. NOW...I make them up online on a website called cram.com. On Cram we can make up our own flashcards, study them, take tests and play educational games.  We can even research other flash cards that others have made for additional information. We are obsessed and treat it like a trivia game even when we are not studying to test ourselves and see what we know and remember.

While we haven't really acclimated to Common Core yet and find it quite confusing, we love that we can head over to Engage NY and see the complete curriculum for our kid's grades and will start making flash cards for the upcoming lessons so we can have a head start during the Winter Break from school.

We have also found a wonderful math resource in Math Goodies which has helped us when we have to give Handsome extra help in math at home.

Hopefully by this time next year, Teach and I are more educated on Common Core and Handsome and Goddess are continuing their educational strides. It has been a trying year!