Birdie's Fall Conference

We met with one of Birdie's teachers for fall conferences before we went to Iowa and learned that Our Birdie is at school the way she is at home, which is to say a confident girl who loves to look at books, make up stories, sing, dance, do art, and help. Birdie's teachers find her very creative. She gravitates toward the books and the story cards (cards with pictures on them one can arrange into different sequences or stories) or the themed art area during free play at school. She also motors through her day singing made up songs along the way, just like she does at home.  Birdie doesn't mind the boys in the room, but she plays mostly with the pack of girls in the room who are about her age.  Apparently they like to have dance parties in the area by the room's radio. Birdie's teacher also noted that Birdie is very serious about her classroom job. She carefully chooses a new one nearly every week (instead of selecting the same one often or over and over) and then she "owns it."

Birdie is still working on using her big girl words instead of tears when she's upset by something, but she knows lots of other things: nearly all of the upper case letters by sight (I--often looks like a lower case L, and thus T--is it an I?, F, V, and W all aren't yet solid), as well as the numbers one through seven. She knows all her shapes except triangle, though she likes to call it a crescent a moon. So she is right on track to move on to pre-K in the spring or fall as space permits.

That brought Julie up a little short: Our Birdie is cruising toward four, and being a pre-kindergartener?!?! The day she dances off to kindergarten is really not so far away. It is easy to overlook three's charms in the midst of its frustrations, and look perhaps too forward to four, forgetting in the moment that we will blink and find ourselves with another grade schooler who is sure to have tacked down upper case Is and triangles, but who will hopefully keep signing and dancing to the beat of her own heart.