Hi Friends:)

Alexei had his first parent-teacher meeting last week in his school. We have previously met his teacher before he started school, but his time we got to know how he was getting on in his teacher’s eyes.

I have to say that I was absolutely terrified of going there. This comes from personal history when my mum would go to my PT meetings and come home absolutely furious.  I would always be given out to even though I was a good student and the phrase do they think we are made of money was always thrown about. 

So when we have received a text from school notifying us of the date and subsequently a letter with the time I was very anxious. 

Finally, that day arrived and both my husband and I went to see the teacher. We were first in and one of the first things that I found out was that PT was carried out just between us and the teacher. No other parents were present. In Belarus, all parents are always in the room and you get to hear about those that are doing bad and good and normally when a teacher was asked what about my daughter reply would have been she is fine… That is after sitting through two hours of discussions about other kids, so no wonder my mum was stressed coming home. 

While walking into school with my hubby we were anticipating what we might be told: hard to control, stubborn, distracts very easily… But it couldn’t have been further from the truth. Alexei’s teacher was happy that both of us took time to come and told us that we have one bright spark. Alexei is very studious and gets instructions from the first time, with no more prompting needed. In fact, he is so fast at learning everything that he is not being taught at the level of senior infants who are being taught in the same classroom. Alexei seems to see numbers in his numbers and can already do additions even though he wasn’t taught them, he figured it out himself. He is also able to read simple words without any context.

Another thing that was mentioned that Alexei is a very deep thinker, well beyond his years. He is constantly analysing everything and deducts the conclusions and outcomes.  For example, a teacher will show a picture of a boy falling off the bike and ask kids to tell a story about a picture. While normally kids would say, a boy was riding a bike and fell off it. Alexei would make a story out of it. So he said. A boy went outside to play and decided to ride his bike. He was riding too fast and fell off and hurt himself. He was very upset and started crying. Not only because he fell, but because he scratched his bike and hurt himself and now he knew that mama will be very upset that he got a cut on his knee and scratched his knee and … so on.  

The teacher also said that Alexei’s face is very expressive, that he wears his emotions on it. That some children come in and have a face that does not change you most definitely know when Alexei is happy and when he is annoyed as he puts on what teacher called a ‘thunder face’.  😛 We know that face very well and from now on that is what we call it 😀 The other thing that was mentioned was that even though the thunder face might appear, it will disappear as fast as it appears and Alexei is mostly a very contented child. 

So overall we felt very very happy and proud of our eldest boy. He is still small only 5 years old but is managing to show us that he well able to handle whatever is thrown at him and is growing up a well-rounded child.