We met with Vince’s third grade teacher this week for a regular parent/teacher conference. I very much like his teacher, very business-like and a little on the stricter side than his previous teachers, which for a wiggle-body like Vince is a good thing. He loves to be with people and loves to learn and be in the classroom. His big stumbling block is that he still reverses a lot of his letters and numbers (the big culprits are “5”, “6”, “k”, “b” and “d”). I did not know that this was happening, but they had started pulling him out of class twice a week for 15-30 minutes to work one-on-one with a reading specialist.
I have known for a while that his handwriting/spelling was atrocious and homework was pretty much unreadable, but I kind of brushed it off thinking that the kids will be typing and using spell-check soon enough, but I kind of forgotten there are *years* between when you learn the letters and when you can hand in a typed-five-standard-paragraph papers.
So I have been sitting down with him more to work on homework together. I am mainly the neatness police, trying to keep the letters more or less going in the same direction and not too squished or too spaced and to make all the reversed letters going the right way. Vince complained I was too picky. He doesn’t know that I could have easily been at least 3 times pickier than I was being! My inner-third-grader can be a perfectionist.
On another note, I had to look up prime factorization this week to make sure I was helping Vince do it right Sheez.
Try a pencil grip for the handwriting. That helped Josh a bit. Josh was the same way until about 7th grade, and even now his handwriting is still not very good. Except with one particular teacher who is old school about it. (Interesting) But then I tried to read my Dr. prescription for me the other day and lets just say Josh has him beat by a long shot!