With school starting next week, (Blake - 3rd grade and Cora - kindergarten) we just received letters in the mail today from the kids' teachers. I love that they are both strong believers of communication! Blake's teacher requested a letter from us telling her about our son - strengths, weaknesses, personality traits, etc. Rather than her having to wait and figure these things out months from now, if she knows up front she will be able to focus on these things right from the start. I think it's a fabulous idea and although I don't know Mrs. Bular, I like her already!! Cora has Mr. Williams for kindergarten and since we already know him (he was Blake's teacher and he goes to our church), we are also very excited about that!
As I was working on the letter to Mrs. Bular, I thought it would be a good idea to share it on this blog. It really does describe him very well at eight years old and it will be neat to look back on years from now. I'm well aware that my letter is probably 3x longer than anyone else's, but hey, I'm ok with that! When you're proud, you're proud! Here's the letter:
8/31/15
Dear Mrs. Bular,
Allow us to introduce Blake Arbaugh. Blake is an energetic, compassionate, honest,
trustworthy, righteous, Godly, intelligent, eager, competitive, rule-following
first-born child. Sports are his
passion, especially baseball. Although
he has excellent leadership abilities and qualities, he often likes to sit back
and observe at first before jumping in feet first in new situations. Blake’s mind is always turning and the
questions that he asks absolutely amaze us.
Blake has a lot of strengths. Tonight at bed time, Blake and I chatted
about his strengths. According to Blake,
his strengths are: athleticism, science, math, reading and spelling. I have to admit, he was right on. Blake is a superb reader, well above his
grade level. He truly enjoys reading,
especially if the content is sports related.
He is also an excellent speller and he also does very well with math,
science, and sports! To be very honest,
I don’t feel like Blake has been challenged much the last couple of years. Thankfully, learning comes very easy to him;
however I would like to see him be challenged a little more this year.
He confessed that his major weakness is Music. “Mom, I’m not
a very good singer.” I assured him that
not all of us were natural born singers, and that is ok, as long as we do our
best. He felt that his other weakness is
division – he said he just doesn’t get it, and that was really bothersome to
him. I reminded him that he hasn’t been
taught division yet, so that’s okay that he doesn’t understand it! (I also promised to give him a division
lesson this week!) We discussed his
weaknesses further and agreed that he does have a few things that he needs to
work on. The number one thing is to slow
down. We feel that if he learns this concept,
everything else will fall into place. In
his journal last year, he often cut the entries short because he wanted to
hurry up and finish. This resulted in scarce
detail and many grammatical and spelling errors. When he would bring his journals home and we
looked them over and reviewed what he did wrong, he knew exactly how to spell
the misspelled words and where to put the punctuation and capital letters. The same thing happened on his math
tests. Although he scored very well, he
might get one or two wrong. When we
reviewed the questions he got wrong, he knew the correct answer instantly, he
either didn’t finish reading the whole question or read so fast that he skipped
over a word (the downside to being a strong reader!).
We are very fortunate that the strengths outweigh the
weaknesses; however I think that’s probably pretty typical of a pair of proud
parents. As parents, we believe that
sports are important because there are a lot of life lessons to learn, but no
matter what – education will always be number one.
I can’t tell you how much we appreciate the letter that you
sent to us, stressing the importance of communication. We could not agree more! What a fantastic idea for you to request this
letter to help you get to know our son better right from the start!
Email is a fantastic communication method for us and we can
always be reached on our cell phones as well.
I strongly encourage you to email me anytime, especially if there are
any issues with Blake. Last year a
couple of times Blake would get his name on the board and he really took it to
heart and was very upset about it. His
teacher would always email me just to give me a heads up and to let me know
exactly what happened and how serious or not serious the incident was. Not because Blake wouldn’t tell us (he always
confesses immediately), but because Blake would be very upset about “getting in
trouble” and we would otherwise not really know how serious the offense
was. Don’t worry – he’s a GREAT kid and
these incidences were few and far between.
Usually it was a result of him talking a little too much!
Again, as proud parents I could go on and on about Blake,
but I think you should have a pretty good snapshot of him to know what to
expect.
Sincerely,
Shannon Arbaugh
