Today we had Tucker’s first parent/teacher conference. Ms. Cami started the meeting saying she wanted us to describe to her our son and she will chime in. Who is Tucker? (MommyDaddy in black, Ms. Cami in amber)
Tucker is a high energy boy and a sensitive little man. Yes, he has very high highs and low lows; he feels deeply. He is very concerned about safety, his and everyone else’s. He’s a bit of a “hall monitor”. Perfect analogy, Tucker does not like when people aren’t following the rules.
This is useful at home as he’s always monitoring and watching over Emilia. Speaking of, he loves his sister, but has an internal struggle about loving her and wanting any attention she might get. Ie: He will squeeze himself between one of us and Emilia to sit on our lap, then turn around and hug her. Pretty normal.
Tucker loves music, he loves to read, he likes to play with friends but also very much likes to have alone time. Is that weird? I actually find it insightful that he is self-aware enough to know when he needs his own space and there are times he definitely needs his own space. But he’s perfectly comfortable playing one-on-one with another child or in a group so I’m not worried.
Overall, I think he’s a normal three year old. Yes, a normal three year old with extraordinary (!) language and vocabulary skills. I have met thousands of three year-olds and he is exceptional in his ability to explain his feelings, tell stories and describe/hypothesize about the world around him.
My concerns, and you cite them on your questionnaire, are about his boundaries and social skills. He has made a lot of progress with learning how to control his volume and feelings (not yell at his friends) over the past year. Recently he’s slipped back into some old habits, most likely due to all the travel and his birthday, but even yesterday he was able to pull out of a near melt-down scenario when he didn’t like the game the kids were playing. We sat down, took a deep breath, and re-approached the situation. He was able to approach the group to play with them and suggested a change in the game that everyone went along with. A few months ago, that wouldn’t have been possible.
We start to go through the picture book of Tucker’s drawings, every month she asks them to draw a person (head, eyes, nose, mouth) on the opposite side of the book are pictures from the month. The drawings mostly look like scribbles, but progressively head-like scribbles. In October, he choose to work on his numbers instead and there’s a very clear “7” among them. There’s a month that’s blank, she said for a month or two Tucker didn’t want to draw anything. (They don’t force art on the kids). We remember this dry artistic spell and comment that he seems to prefer to read. Ms. Cami agreed. He loves to read and to read with his friends, sharing a book was his first break-out sharing moment.
We start to look through the pictures. There’s a picture (below) of Tucker playing on the floor with these magnetic tiles – http://www.magnatiles.com/. THIS. Tucker will play with toys in ways that none of the other kids do. These tiles for instance, we always play with them on the desk and most kids will build structures out of them. One day, Tucker asked me if he could play with them on the floor. I agreed and watched as he lined up the squares in a straight line to make a base and set each adjacent tile vertically (imagine a row of upright dominos) and then he knocked them all down so they fell domino style. (note – we have not yet done the domino trick, but will immediately.) This is just one example, he frequently finds inventive ways to play with the toys that we haven’t seen before.
By this time, we were 15 minutes over and rushed out. But there you have it, first parent/teacher conference down. NAILED IT!
