Kylie’s first parent teacher conference of her first grade year was today and we are very happy to report that she is doing very well. Kylie is currently reading at level 8 and she needs to reading at level 16 by the end of the year. Her teacher thinks that at the rate Kylie is learning and picking up this necessary skill she will be reading at between a level 20 and 22 by the end of year. This of course makes Mommy and I very happy, as we both enjoy reading and are trying to install that joy in Kylie as well. Seeing as she already enjoys going to the library and picking out books, we think we are on the right track. Additionally she is doing well in math but she needs help with money, mainly what each coin is worth. Mommy and I are trying to figure out a good way to help her with this, as the times have changed so much from when we were kids. See when Mommy and I were young it was still very common for our parents to pay for purchases with cash and coins, which means we could handle them everyday and help in making purchases. This constant handling of money made it a lot easier for us to pick up on money and each pieces value. However now it is less common to use cash and more common to use debit or credit cards, in fact it is so common that Daddy almost never has any cash on him at all. I am sure we will figure out a way to help her in this, as it is still a very important piece of information she needs to learn. Speaking of important skills, Kylie is also doing really well with writing and sounding out words, spelling them phonetically and learning how the actually spelling of words differ from the way they sound. She often asks us how to spell words while writing little notes and even more often will say to someone “Guess what. I know how to spell…wanna see?” and then she will spell a word. Sometimes she correct to the true spelling of the word and sometimes she makes a very good attempt by spelling the word the way it sounds. When she spells the word incorrectly we tell her the correct spelling and why it differs from what she gave, and more often than not she only needs to be told the correct spelling once. We are confident that the rest of the year, academically speaking, will go by without an issue and she will continue to learn and expand her knowledge ahead of the curve. Now if we can just do something about these boys Daddy will be even happier. 🙂