We’ve had parent-teacher conferences since Kaia was in daycare. We had them in 3K and 4K; all of them seemed fairly straightforward. We never heard anything that really surprised us about how Kaia behaves in class. She’s always been a very social, enthusiastic child who loves spending time with others. She generally respects authority figures while also occasionally attempts to test them. Today we had two parent-teacher conferences, the first with her English teacher and the second with her main two Chinese/homeroom teachers.

As expected, we heard about her growth in areas like attention span and writing mechanics in the short time she’s been in kindergarten, so almost two months now. One thing I have thought a lot about in our homework struggles, especially in the weekday evenings, is how maybe the muscles in her hands just haven’t developed enough, and that’s why she finds it uncomfortable to write… and thus dreads doing weeknight homework. One way to really develop that is to encourage her to keep writing in smaller spurts. And for fun things, she could do things like use a water spray bottle (strengthens the same muscles, surprise surprise, which she loves doing already!), roll and make shapes with Play Doh (which will need to be played with at the table, ONLY), and use kid-friendly scissors to cut shapes, tear paper, and crumple balls. Some of these were suggested by the teachers; others I looked up after the discussion. I think this could be another fun form of play that could help develop her hand muscles to make writing less annoying. And we all know she loves to draw and color, so of course we want her to continue that.

These are all the little things we don’t really think about as adults because we take these skills for granted; we’ve been doing them for so long, so we don’t immediately think these could be issues. But it’s comforting to know that Kaia has supportive teachers who want to help and can give us ideas at home to support. On the other hand, these are all things that are hard for me to relate to because unlike Kaia, I was not the youngest in my class; I was usually the oldest or one of the oldest (and biggest in kindergarten!). I also was writing letters (very regularly) before I even got to kindergarten. So this is about learning to be patient and helping my baby grow, which is going to be at a different rate than I remember for myself.