Recent work from Jake and parent-teacher conference

Jake comes home with a lot of worksheets and art from school, which I love seeing.  Yesterday, he came home with two that I wanted to share....the first one he made in art class and he had to pick out pictures of his favorite areas of school (he chose his classroom, the playground, the gym, the cafeteria, and the library), then write what he does in those areas:

We learned during our recent parent-teacher conference that they are working a lot on sounding out words and writing them down with no assistance.  The teacher said that it doesn't matter if they get the spelling correct, that the point of the exercise is to work on sounding out the words and being able to write them down as best they can while sounding them out.  They've sent home a few of these exercises where they are given open ended statements that they have to complete:

In case you can't see it, the statement given was I like the....and Jake completed it with "character Mickey".  I told you he was going through severe Disney withdrawal! I know I'm biased, but I think his little drawing is fantastic...he told me it was a picture of him and Liam at Disney when they met Mickey on the first day and got his autograph.

The parent-teacher conference was a few weeks ago, and the teacher is very pleased with Jake's progress.  She said he's very quickly picking up on the reading concepts and also seems to enjoy math.  She said he seems to be adjusting well socially, and has a few friends in the class that he always pals around with.  Her one area that she suggested for improvement would be that he sometimes forgets that he can't talk to his friends while class is going on and she's trying to teach, though she said as soon as she says something to him, he does stop. I mentioned it to Jake at home and told him he really needs to work on not talking during class.  He said sometimes he's asking the person sitting next to him a question about what the teacher is saying, and other times he wants to tell his friend something and he's afraid he will forget :)  We talked about how he can raise his hand if he has a question for the teacher, if he doesn't understand what she's saying, but if it's just something he needs to tell his friend, it has to wait until an appropriate time. 

All in all, a successful first conference!