Setting the goals at the parent-teacher conference

Big things are coming Evangeline's way the next couple months, as she works to improve her focus, tackle two big projects and tackle some tough new math skills at school.

Those are the goals Evangeline, her teacher and I set after our second parent-teacher-student conference, last Thursday. Parents, teachers and students meet every trimester at the charter school to measure the student's progress and to set personal goals for the next three months.

The biggest problem Evangeline is having at school remains her time management skills, which isn't too surprising, given her father's own problems in that area. Evangeline herself admits that she sometimes gets distracted by what her classmates are doing, and she often spends more time on lunch than she should.

I've been trying to address this at home by giving her a preset time limit for certain tasks -- say, twenty minutes to complete a writing exercise -- and hoping that the steady reinforcement will help her internalize the skills. I don't know what else I can do.

The first of Evangeline's big assignments is to read the Magic Tree house book "Dingoes at Dinnertime." As she reads, Evangeline is supposed to write down any new words she encounters, and then write a book report once she finishes reading. She also is supposed to create a model of the tree house to put in a re-created scene from the book, complete with a full-color backdrop.

Unfortunately, she claims to have finished reading the book already -- she just checked it out from the class library yesterday -- and it's difficult to get her to read something twice, even a Roald Dahl book. So I'm going to have to read through the book with her, asking her about each word I think she doesn't know, and having her take time to write the book report as we go.

The other big project this trimester is to research Roald Dahl, whose books Evangeline loves to read. Her research project last trimester was Barbie. I have to admit I'm looking forward to this one a bit more, since I enjoyed Roald Dahl's books when I was her age, and am finding them a blast as we read them through together. We've borrowed a children's book about Dahl from the library, so the next step is to figure out artwork and start designing the poster, I guess.

Less dramatic an undertaking than her two big projects, but no less important, Evangeline is going to be hitting the math books a little extra. A lot of the homework assignments she's been getting have been below her ability level pretty severely. So, instead of those, we're going to tackle multiplication, graphing and fractions.

That might seem like a lot, but Evangeline already understands the ideas behind multiplication and fractions -- she even can do a few multiplication problems with no fuss -- so it's really a matter of developing the concepts further for her. The only new skill will be graphing, and given her mathematical brain, I don't foresee many problems there either.

At our last parent-teacher-student conference, we set Evangeline the Barbie research project, the time-management goal, and the task of learning to recognize the various U.S. denominations of coin. Evangeline excelled at the Barbie project, and not only knows her coins and their values, she can add them effortlessly in her head and find multiple combinations for the same amount. (She's also begun participating fully in gym class, which had been a concern before.)

So there are some big goals on the horizon for her this time too, but I think she's going to do just fine.