TL;DR

Ms Carla: “He’s ready for 1st grade! He’s a great addition to the community.”
Mr. Ben: “A lot of children struggle to make friends in the other kindergarten class because they only see them during recess or sporadically. But Elliot is friends with and plays with children from both classes. Today at recess he played almost exclusively with people from the other homeroom. He has friends everywhere.

General Comments – Ms. Carla

Elliot continues to absolutely love school. He comes in, he does what he’s supposed to do. He loves being with his friends on the playground; being a boy. Loves to play. Loves to use his imagination. The story he tells are unbelievable. Sweet, kind, polite. He very respectful.

Sometimes he presents as being really, really tired during our instructions blocks. We try to have him persevere so he can get the information he needs to work independently. Sometimes if he doesn’t get enough information, a teacher has to explain to him one-on-one. But once that happens, he soars. His work is accurate and he turns it in. But focusing and being present during the entire instruction block is one of our goals for him. It’s a long day, and he’s not the only child like this. He is much better now than our last parenting conference. It’s not as common as it used to be.

Literacy – Ms Carla

Elliot is able to isolate sounds. Short vowels, long vowels, CVC words, consonants. He’s decoding. Knows 22 out of 27 of the heart words which amazing (normally they shoot for only 13 or 14 by now). He mastered “digraphs” (two letter that come together to make a sound — s and h and t and h).

He’s reading at a level B, almost C. Should be at “D” by end of kindergarten. He will have no problem getting there.

Hebrew – Morah Ester

Elliot’s been doing great!

He can count 1-10. Wrote the Hebrew alphabet to Mem (normal). Got all the letters sounds. Needed help with a couple of vocabulary words but got almost all of them. So he’s paying attention to words. He knew all the vocabulary words during his assessment. He gave all smilies on his self-evaluation. He feels confident in Hebrew.

Math – Mr. Ben

Starts out struggling but then gets it. Subtraction: he nailed some pages (the ones with pictures) but not others. Counting the numbers to 100: he did it in class all the time but not during the assessment. He was tired. He can count by 10s then count on from there. Addition: he guessed sometimes instead of trying to figure it out. Doing great with sorting: sort by color, size, by taste, etc. Work on at home: subtraction and a little bit of addition. Sometimes he misses the sign (plus or minus) so mix up some problems and get him to pay attention to the sign.

Judaics – Morah Rebekah

Elliot is super-connected to the stories of Judaism. He perks up at any story – the Parsha or story of the week, or any other story. He knows the Tefilah songs but doesn’t always want to sing. He participates in everything else and talks and repeats back what he learns. He is very engaged. He enjoys it. He’s connected. Some units we covered: T’Bishvat, Exodus, 10 Plagues, Crossing of the Red Sea, 10 Commandments, Golden Calf, the portable synagogue (Tabernacle), what the priests wore.