SEPs

I love SEPs. (For those of you who don't know they are the School Education Plan meetings, formerly called Parent/Teacher Conferences.) At SEPs you sit down, listen to an evaluation of how your child is doing and then make goals on how your child can improve. The student comes along so they are involved in the process. In Kindergarten and 1st grade, they were 5 minute things where they said, "Yup, he's doing great. Any questions?" This time, we decided that Bryan didn't have to go because it involves taking time off work, driving to the school and driving back to work for a 5 minute conference. But it was different. In 2nd grade, his teacher took over 20 minutes with us, it was awesome.

SEPs are a time when you are told that you aren't just bias toward your child...everyone else thinks they are great/smart/awesome/wonderful too!! Ethan's teacher has been teaching for a long time so she had the drill down. She talked to us about his reading level and his comprehension (which are both great!)and how he really uses his time wisely and is a great friend. Then she turned the time over to Ethan and had him make a list of everything he is good at (she let Courtney and me add some things too). He said he is good at building Legos, math, art and that he loves to learn. Courtney said that he is the "greatest" big brother and that he loves her. I said that he is compassionate and very excited to learn new things. His teacher added other things that she appreciated.

We then had time to make goals. Ethan wants to finish reading the Harry Potter series, pass his Wednesday spelling pre-test each week so he can skip the Friday spelling test and he wants to keep learning well. He also set out a plan to accomplish all these things.

It was a great time. His teacher also asked my permission to have him tested to see how high his reading level really is. Teachers can only test up to the top of their grade level in reading. A 2nd grade teacher can't tell you if a student is reading at 4th grade level because they are only testing their grade level proficiency. But there is a test, given on computer, that can test grade level reading, so she asked if she could administer that to Ethan, just to see how high he is. He said that was okay with him and that he didn't feel any pressure, so I gave my permission too. She is going to try and get that done sometime in the next month. I'll be interested to see the results because Ethan has always loved to read.

After we were finished, Ethan wanted to show me all around his classroom. He loved showing me things and his teacher would give me more details about what they did at each center, etc. It was fun and we ended up being there for over 30 minutes by the time we left. It was a good SEP.