Military precision

Husbandio and I attended our first ever school parents' consultation evening tonight which, not that I was concerned, went very well. The affair itself was choreographed to the second - each set of parents had an allocated ten minute slot, and the head teacher announced the changeover from one set of parents to another by ringing a bell. One of the other mums told me she was so aware that they had to finish when the bell rang that she stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence, got up, thanked the teacher and left!

Ten minutes doesn't feel like very long when you're talking about a subject of such central importance as your child's progress, but I suppose with 30 kids to a class it's difficult to squeeze in any more. As it was, the appointments were held over two days. One of things I'd wanted to ask was about Isabel's reading: I have no benchmark against which to judge her progress, so while it seems to me that she's doing brilliantly, I wanted to hear that from someone more qualified! I also wanted to ask if we could start taking home some reading books with actual words in them, and found out more about why the discussion books are useful (shows the kids that, when they're writing stories, there's no right or wrong way of telling it - the story can do what you want it to, and there might be more than one way of interpreting it). We've been promised reading books with words after half term provided she can read her keyword set by then - all of those keywords will be featured in the first books which gives the kids a real confidence boost, since they'll actually be able to read these books properly. How exciting! Will definitely be working on her keywords over half term. I really don't feel I'm forcing this on her though - the first thing she wanted to do when she got home at lunchtime today was to get out her new keywords and go through them. Her idea, not mine!

My only worry now is that the books she'll be getting will be distinctly uninspiring. The school uses the Oxford Reading Tree series, and I found an article today which complained about how turgid the content of these can be. If the ones with words are anything like the ones without, I'm not expecting too much. But then, how exciting can these books be when they contain such a limited set of words? I'm just looking forward to seeing how pleased with herself she will be when she reads through her first book by herself.