Here at AEIOU we love hearing of the progress of our past students. Leah's Mum Renee updated Sally Yin, Toowoomba Centre Manager, on Leah's achievements in her first year since graduating from AEIOU, attending Prep and participating in extra-curricular activities. Renee was very happy for us to share her letter with other AEIOU families. Thanks very much Renee, it is great to see how much Leah is enjoying life.
Dear Sally,
Merry Christmas! I hope the end of the year has gone well, and you're all looking forward to a nice break over the holidays.
Just a Leah update for the end of the year.
We've been ridiculously busy with end-of-year stuff. She did her first ballet concert - we had hair and makeup and an 'Elsa' dress (they danced to a Frozen song), and all of that went pretty well. She coped up on stage with 20ish other little Elsas', and did a lovely job two nights in a row. Although after the first night, she decided she'd get the costume for one of the other dances and do that on the second night - it took a bit of explaining that she couldn't join a dance she hadn't learned.
She's been going to swimming lessons this year, and did quite well at her swimming carnival.
She got a second and a third ribbon in two kickboard races, and came 5th in freestyle. There were only 9 girls doing freestyle out of about 60 in prep at her school, so that was fairly impressive. Even more was her sitting in the stands in wet togs for about 4 hours, surrounded by 200other wet, noisy kids. I don't think I could have coped with that!
Then she received 3 awards over the last few weeks - she finally won 'Power Piggy', which was their class mascot. They got raffle tickets for good work and the child with the most at the end of the week took Power Piggy home for the weekend. She won in the second last week of school - I was pretty stressed that we wouldn't win the power pig at all, which would have been a bit devastating. She won Student of the Week the same week, for good academic achievements and improvements making friends.
She has come a long way in that area, which is nice. She has a new 'best friend' every week or two, but she seems to be a lot better at joining in, and knowing how to ask kids to play. Her special needs teacher has been working on it pretty hard,
and her teacher spent a fair bit of energy with reward charts for playing and she just loves playing with kids now. We've had a few play dates, and even a sleepover here one night, which went pretty well.
I was happiest that she won a 'Golden Letter', which is a certificate they get if they've been given the highest rating for behaviour on their report card, which she hadn't in first semester, but did this time. We're very proud that she has managed so well.
Academically, she's doing fine - she got an A for maths and a B for English. Less good for history, geography and science (imagine teaching preppies geography), but as far as I can tell, those are assessed with a lot of verbal explaining of concepts, and she still has some difficulty there.
So all is going well and moving forward. Wishing all at AEIOU a wonderful holiday and a happy new year!
Renee
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