Walks to the Park

The weather has been beautiful here this month--lots of sunny days with the temperatures in the 60s and 70s. Eric has also started enjoying one of the nearby parks called Phil Hardberger Park. He likes playing on playground equipment there, from the swings to the climbing structures. We've been walking there on most of the Saturdays this month, and even on some Sundays.

Eric is usually pretty energetic on the way to the park. He often jogs most of the way there. Mind you--it's over a mile walk to get to the playground from our house and he jogs most of the way. He is not usually as energetic on the way back. I usually have to convince him to walk a little faster. There are a few benches on the way, but there is one in particular that is about halfway between our house and the playground. There is a circular paved area in front of that bench. In the past, I've run some laps around that small circular area in front of the bench to get some extra cardio exercise in while he rested. I tell him how many laps I'm going to run and then I tell him that after that many, I want to get going. This time he told me something like, "You can run three laps while I rest and then we can go." He wasn't bossy, but I thought it was funny that he was telling me how many laps to run. This is a picture of him holding up how many laps I've just run! He wanted to make sure I didn't lose count. :)

This is from yesterday--Saturday. Patrick went with Eric and me to the park. He decided to get on one of the swings with Eric, and here he is trying to time his swing so that he could swing with Eric. After a few minutes, Patrick went back ahead of us so he could go ahead and take his shower before we got home, then we could get ready to go to church and then dinner.

Alex was out with friends and was planning to spend the night at his friend John's house. Natalie was at a birthday party all day, but she was going to want to be picked up so that she could get some good sleep in her own bed. It was just the three of us all afternoon and evening--a glimpse of our future when the oldest three leave home. Patrick and I are savoring our time with our Eric, and the weather has been cooperating.

Student-Led Conference

My schedule for this week flip-flopped a couple of times, but luckily, the end result was that I got the day off today. That meant that I got to attend Eric's Student-Led Conference at school which Patrick had already scheduled for today at 1:20pm. Eric had an early dismissal from school today at 1pm, so we met up with him shortly before his scheduled conference then went to his classroom to wait for his teacher. His teacher was out with the kids in class who were going to be picked up in the car line, so she wasn't there at first.

I'm not sure if Eric was nervous or impatient, but he pulled up a chair at his desk (all the chairs in the classroom had been stacked and put away), and when Patrick and I grabbed chairs and sat down also, Eric opened up his binder and started reading from a script. They started doing these "Student-Led Conferences" a few years back. I prefer the parent-teacher conferences where we get to talk to the teacher, but these are good practice for the kids to practice getting organized and talking about their progress in school. Of course I enjoy spending more time with Eric, especially when he says more than "good" when we ask him how school went.

I included the front and back of the front page of his presentation. Eric read these pages and all the other pages in a monotonous tone. I tried to teach him about making eye contact with your audience when you're doing a presentation. He nodded to acknowledge what I said, but then proceeded to read without looking up in a monotonous tone just as he was before. The rest of the presentation was pretty much the same, with a few details including some benchmark scores and reading levels.

If you click on the pictures, you can see them bigger so you can actually read the pages. Note that Eric answered all the questions with what you might expect. "If you just walked into the room, you would probably see me like this: I pay attention. When we're discussing something as a class, and I know the answer: I raise my hand." Of course, when his teacher came in, she confirmed that Eric is "a good boy" and those answers were accurate after all. I had no doubt, but I just had to make sure. :)