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    Joined: May 2012
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    You all are awesome...thanks so much for the encouragement. It honestly did not dawn on me that they would think ds was BEHIND. The AR system sounds promising at least as a challenge for ds. It is clear by his lack of 'altruistically' doing the challenge packets that he needs more incentive to push himself. I AM very grateful that he is not outright miserable in class. VERY grateful - but I see that he is clearly hiding his abilities. He's such a people-pleaser and just wants to do exactly what the teacher wants: if that's writing "s" and "2" over and over, he'll oblige. No matter that he spent the weekend memorizing the US state capitals and nicknames of his own fruition (thanks Scrambled States of America game!).

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    When my DD was in K, the school acknowledged that she was way ahead in reading (it was hard not to when she was speeding through chapter books whenever a spare moment appeared...can your DS bring some to school? Are there any in the classroom?) However, when it came to math, we were also told she was "fine" and "on grade level." The evidence for this? "Her performance is good, but she doesn't choose to work ahead in the math book like some of the kids do. She prefers to free read instead."

    Gee, yet more 2 + 2 problems or reading my chapter book? Tough call.

    Anyway. Do give it a bit more time. I know how you feel. I was you once. School is...glacial. Incremental. Keep chipping away. You have some leverage. Keep working on it.

    Last edited by ultramarina; 10/10/12 07:30 AM.
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    I just posted something similar about my ds5 and how he is hiding his light under a bushel. The GATE director said to just let him coast along until 3rd grade as long as he is happy. (However, our district has a beautiful GATE school that my dd7 attends and the GATE director knows our family. YMMV)

    You're not crazy! There were just a bunch of things working against you here.

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    Originally Posted by ultramarina
    Gee, yet more 2 + 2 problems or reading* my chapter book? Tough call.


    * Gee, yet more 2 + 2 problems, or escaping my stultifying environs with a book that opens the door to any information, place, time, or situation either real or imagined...
    (fixed it for ya wink )
    Doesn't seem at all hard for me to understand. DD still does this when presented with the opportunity. Heck-- I do this, at least occasionally. LOL.



    Originally Posted by kcab
    IMHO, the important thing is to have faith in your judgement and continue to believe in your child's ability. At least, I've found myself questioning my judgement and doubting my child when I've encountered this type of situation. And yet, in time my position has turned out to be correct.

    Amen to that. When you begin to feel like Alice in Wonderland, just remind yourself to quit doing everything that hookah-smoking caterpillars tell you to do. Er-- or something like that. grin


    Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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    I realized what it felt like in that meeting: like I was part of the famous Milgram's study on peer pressure. It makes me frustrated that they never ONCE asked why it was that I suspect that ds is ahead. Not once. Even when I offered that he was comprehending his reading very well at home, they never asked anything about it.

    I'm trying not to let it mess with my reality. My ds helped me this morning at the breakfast table. He proclaimed something like this:

    "Some numbers are negative, so they are below zero. Zero is kind of like the Equator. The Northern Hemisphere is like the positive numbers and the Southern Hemishere is like the negative. Except, that it's spring in the Southern Hemisphere right now...so I think THEY should be the positive half since temperatures get below zero in winter."

    I'm not trying to be a jerk, but isn't that somewhat out of the box and forward thinking for a 6 year old? Wouldn't a teacher be interested in a kid who can stretch, think and make associations like that?

    Apparently, they are more concerned that he missed one problem of 'fill in the number on the number line'.

    Where's the hoookah?

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    "Some numbers are negative, so they are below zero. Zero is kind of like the Equator. The Northern Hemisphere is like the positive numbers and the Southern Hemishere is like the negative. Except, that it's spring in the Southern Hemisphere right now...so I think THEY should be the positive half since temperatures get below zero in winter."

    This is the exact type of thing my son does. It is his ability to find similarities, make connections between ideas and apply knowledge to new situations that make him seem gifted. At school he is a play doh and snack time loving social butterfly that hates seat work. He had an evaluation before early K and we shared the results with his teacher over the summer. I am sure after a month of school, she thinks he is a bright but normal boy. I am certain he has done nothing at school in the past month to make the teacher believe he is even moderately gifted much less exceptionally or profoundly gifted as his scores would indicate.

    I don't have any advice. Just wanted to say, I am dealing with the same thing and I also think it is frustrating.


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    Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
    * Gee, yet more 2 + 2 problems, or escaping my stultifying environs with a book that opens the door to any information, place, time, or situation either real or imagined...
    (fixed it for ya wink )
    Doesn't seem at all hard for me to understand. DD still does this when presented with the opportunity. Heck-- I do this, at least occasionally. LOL.

    LOL DD9 did this last night: "This math homework is too easy and there's too much of it." ...so she wandered off and read for two hours.

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    Sorry for the bad experience. frown I'd say to get some achievement testing done on your own, but would they even look at it?

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    I'm so sorry you feel so discouraged and I completely understand your frustration. My thoughts -
    DS started reading at 2.5. At home, we are reading chapter books such as Magic Tree House (not sure what the level is, certainly not MAJORLY advanced, but pretty sure it's above a D). I asked how they came to this level, and the teacher (without any actual assessment in hand) explained that it probably wasn't his fluency but his reading comprehension that was struggling.
    Several thoughts on this - my dss also were assessed WAY below level in K. Older ds went from a level D to an S in kindy, which of course, only "confirmed" for the school what a great job they were doing (not that they had completely missed his skills on the first test.... GRRRRR!!). What helped for me was sitting down with the teacher and looking at his evaluation sheets. I found that they wanted very specific answers and often, my ds (the one with speech issues which eventually were diagnosed as including expressive language issues)simply didn't say enough. When *I* talked to him about the stories, it was clear he understood everything. I had to ask the teacher, not to prompt him exactly, but to say, "and???....." He didn't need hints; he just needed to know that they were looking for more. The grading system is really weird. To give you additional commiseration, he was tested in 3rd grade at an "R" level - apparently his reading got worse from K to 3rd?? Yeah, right.

    My ds' levels were everywhere: 99% in certain subtests and 10% in another. In fact, that one was letter identification, which everyone agreed meant that ds was clearly CLEARLY not invested in the assessment process. So essentially, they gave me all this information that, not only was ds not ahead, but he was potentially barely meeting standards. WTF?
    My ds had some of the same issues. He started reading very early and by kindy was reading the first Harry Potter. BUT - he hadn't necessarily learned letter names or sounds. He wasn't interested in the phonics aspect because he was so far beyond that. Also, he had been a spontaneous reader, not one who was taught or who learned by separating out sounds, etc. The AIMSweb things were easy for my second son, because even though he was also a fluent reader, he had asked to be taught to read in preK and had followed the traditional "this is B, B makes the bbbbb sound." So, your son may not even be "not invested," he just may be so beyond that level that he really hasn't thought about breaking down the words into their component elements.
    I get the school can only see what ds shows them. But, then the teacher explained that she had given ds a challenge packet to work on (optionally) and he has chosen not to do so
    Wow, I feel like we have secret twins wink Okay, my son had the same issue. One, he is really smart but wasn't particularly quick/good at OT in kindy. So, the challenge packet *after* he did everything else was useless. Secondly, it was still the same boring, mundane, busy work that was in the other work, just harder. He preferred to read in his free time.
    I asked my dh why he didn't speak up - but he said it wouldn't mean anything if ds isn't showing him his abilities. It would've meant something to me: that I am not crazy in my assessment that ds could've passed K curriculum LAST year (or even earlier).
    Try not to let this come between you and dh. My dh is fairly quiet, factual, unemotional. His typical response to me re: these meetings was always, "what is your objective in telling them that?" I wanted to vent my frustration at the school, but he only believed in saying something with a specific goal in mind and one that he thought would be achieveable. If they weren't going to agree, he wasn't going to waste time arguing. I found over many years of IEP meetings, I needed to very specifically tell him in advance, "I need you to back me up on this. I need you to tell them that our child can do this." It wasn't that he didn't believe it, or agree with me, but he never talks without a specific, achievable purpose in mind.

    All in all, I totally get your frustration. I was where you are at in kindy, and even worse, ds ended up tanking on his first OLSATs (we realized later that oral directions were hard for him to process... when he took them the second time a year later-with written directions-he went from 18%-ile in nonverbal to 99th%-ile). For the most part, I just kept repeating myself, and really trying to work with the teacher on the assessment front. When we had conferences (at my request), I'd often have ds there and I'd lead him through some stuff. I'm not trying to make this sound like a dog-and-pony show, but for example, anyone reading your story about positive and negative numbers should GET that your son is atypical. But, the average assessments in kindy just don't allow your son to show that. Eventually, the teachers caught on. Now, he's in 7th grade, in a great gifted program, rocks his testing, rocked the SAT last year, all good. With ds10, I think I had a better handle on it and pushed harder for enrichment (thus he now goes to the MS for math). It does get better, but it's very frustrating at the time.
    Hang in there and continue to advocate. You're not crazy, you're not off the mark, your son is NOT a typical kindy as far as academics.
    Good luck!!

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    Blech. I hate those meetings where they work more to intimidate in the name of a "team."

    OK, positives from the meeting: Someone will test him on the math. He'll do AR.

    Put it in a neutrally-worded email to all present at the meeting, and express your thanks for taking the time to meet with you. If you don't have a timeline for the math testing and beginning AR, ask for clarification of the timing in the email.

    On the reading comprehension, we're currently "teaching to the test" so that we can figure out more accurately what his real reading level is. The kids have to reply with the NAMES of the main characters (not just "it was about two dogs," but "the story is about two dogs named Rocky and Spot", identify the setting and when it took place, and recount the story with detail from beginning to end. For these lower level books, it often requires bringing in details only in the pictures, and reciting the text nearly word-for-word.

    Coach him on being invested in the AIMSWEB assessments. He'll take another one soon.

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