I've been reading these and I'm glad to see some of our kids are thriving. I haven't posted updates because I've been down and felt very powerless to help DS. He's not as gifted as some kids here, I'd put him MG - maybe HG, but he has his areas of strength. He was advanced to first grade math and it's a good fit for him. The problem we have is the afternoon, oh how I regret choosing an all day program.
He's supposed to have rest time and although it's clear none of the kids in his class rest he's still expected to rest. She won't allow him to read until after Thanksgiving so he gets into trouble for not laying still. We do behavior sheets now with smiles or frowns by each gtime of day. He's gotten better but still has problems. It's usually stupid little things. I fear he's getting the message that he's a bad kid.
Reading is awful. At first he had to go through with the class and learn each letter, I wasn't thrilled but was told he'd do walk to reading and be grouped after that. I figured he could handle it for that short time. Now walk to reading has started but they only do half of the reading period, now he's expected to work on each letter for two days learning the sound with his main kindergarten group. His MAP tested was at 2nd grade but I think when we just look at word recognition and comprehension he's in the 3rd-4th grade range. In walk to reading he is reading and doing book reports, the book he last read was Fuzzy Farm and his book report was copying words down and drawing a picture from the story. So even advanced reading is nowhere near what he needs. I don't know how they can expect him to handle this when a second grader would lose their mind doing it.
Also the projects are typical kindergarten projects, coloring, cutting etc. He has gotten OK with it but there's a lot and it doesn't fit him at all. He's a three dimensinal kid. Like last night he drew a maze which was a couple of somewhat parallel lines and then he took the Jenga blocks and built a maze and that was a lot more complex.
I visited a different school that has a good gifted program but it's a pull out program. I need to start a different thread because I'm not sure how this will help. They will work with younger kids, like DS, but the classroom still won't fit him as well. I've considered homeschooling but socially there's so few kids around that he wouldn't get the play time and he's not a kid who is driven. He performs better for someone else. He has this fear of failure and he has a tough time challenging himself because of it. That's why he chose Fuzzy Farm for reading, it was easy, although he can read books substantially harder than that.
I'm going to meet with the teacher early next week and talk about the reading program. I know a parent last year homeschooled her DD for reading and I may propose that if he doesn't have any good solutions. We read less now and I think he's backsliding. Plus I can also add science in which he misses and use it as a test run to see if maybe we can homeschool.
Last edited by Kareninminn; 11/13/09 08:12 AM.
