I went to the parent/teachers meeting with the new girl and her mom today. She has gone up a whole grade level in reading since I started tutoring her! I had guessed as much, but they have letters for the different levels within a grade, and even the 2 teachers -- her main teacher and her ESL teacher -- didn't believe it till they wrote out all those levels and saw where she had started in the fall and where she is now. Without really understanding what those letters mean, I had an accurate
sense of where she is and where she had been. She is really smart and has an excellent memory, but at school, like with me, she is very distractible. I think it's because her mind is working a million miles a minute, and she has trouble slowing down and taking things a step at a time. She is also very chatty and apparently distracts the other kids when they should be working. I've seen this, too. I do think she's getting better about focus, though. It's not the astronomical leaps forward that her reading took, but she is slowly improving. So I didn't really learn anything new from the teachers, but maybe they found out some things from me. And her mom, whose English isn't very good, was glad I was along to communicate with the teachers.
