Lydia’s parent-teacher conference was this afternoon. Both Olof and I had been going to go, but Tage fell asleep not long before we would have had to leave and I decided to go by myself and leave Tage and Olof at home. I met with Lydia’s fritids leader, Kent (who was her teacher last year), her teacher, Pia, and the aide who helps her with Swedish, Ingrid. I like both Kent and Pia very well and I’m glad that they’re Lydia’s teachers. Ingrid is nice, too, but we definitely rub each other the wrong way at times. She’s one of those people who thinks that we should be speaking all Swedish all the time, even at home amongst ourselves, and she just can’t seem to accept that it’s never going to happen. She gives strange little tidbits of advice, too, which annoys me a bit. Today she told me to encourage Lydia to speak Swedish with her friends. Eh, what the hell else is she going to speak with a bunch of seven-year-olds?!

Anyway, Kent was very positive about Lydia’s progress since last year. He said she gets much more involved with the other kids and that she talks a lot more than she did when she first started. She has always liked him really well and they have a great rapport, so it’s nice that they still see each other a lot even though he’s not her primary teacher anymore.

Pia was also positive and said that Lydia’s reading and writing have improved quite a bit since last fall. She also told me that the school has bought some English-language software for Lydia, so that she can practice her English at school (immigrant kids in Sweden have a right to home-language instruction, if there are five or more kids in the kommun–county–with the same home language. There are too few native English speakers here for them to have to provide English instruction to Lydia, so it’s a nice bonus that the school decided to do something anyway). I’m glad she’s going to be starting that, because her English has really taken a nose-dive in the past year or so, and every little bit of practice helps. Pia told me that they had had a choice between British and American English, and that they had chosen American, which I thought was especially nice, since British English is the norm in schools here.