Can we finally relax a little now??
Lovely to hear good news and wonderful to sense some relief.
Some may say it is time to document the meeting, thanking people for their time/interest and recounting your understanding of positives and agreements reached. Parents may wish to keep rather complete documentation at home, and decide what parts of it to share with the meeting attendees, keeping in mind that e-mails to schools may become open records, and information shared on public forums may be widely read.
At some point parents may wish to ensure they have a solid understanding of what a school means by "differentiation" and "testing out if needed in math and reading for 1st grade". For example:
- Is differentiation a higher set of expectations for the child's performance and volume of output/productivity (
differentiated task demands)?
- Is this a choice a child must make between working with the class or doing worksheets in isolation?
- Does differentiation include instruction in higher level material or is the child required to be entirely autodidactic?
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What level of mastery allows a child to test out, 90%, 95%, 100%? Knowing that each year most children are routinely promoted to the next grade with less than 100% mastery (as 76%-79% is often considering a "passing" grade) some families have successfully advocated for their gifted or high-achieving children to take the school's end-of-year tests early to be subject accelerated.
Here's an
old post with a roundup of wry descriptions of gifted program/service buzzwords.
While things are going well, you may wish to study
advocacy skills as they may come in handy in the future.
