The teacher does try to use my DD5
she asks her harder questions,
So far my DD5 is happy,
her behavior has been great,
and has made a new friend,
2.5 hr day
I think they have been assessing them here
These are all things to celebrate and enjoy! Yippee! 2.5 hours is a great amont of time to have school. Now that your daughter is at school, you have more of an opportunity to go and observe a 1st and 2nd grade class. Go watch and see what next year might look like. I predict that she is academically about 3rd grade. Please go and observe and prove me wrong. That will give you enough of an understanding to communicate with the classroom teacher. Which you need to do because...
...but the assessment is even low (letter sounds, identifying letters and other things that even my three year old would find too easy).
This usually leads to teachers heaving a sigh of relief and stopping the assesment at the low level because the belief that real kids who have real academic needs at a much higher level just isn't out there. Now - while her behavior is good, is the time to act. First by observing the other grade rooms, and then by setting up a sit down meeting with the kindy teacher and very politely and very insistantly find out if the materials exist to assess your child up to the 4th grade level if needed.
Schools don't really care about IQ and achievement tests because they don't line up 1-1 with the kind of outcomes they are used to caring about - their own assesments and behavior goals.
Some school have a learning specialist who has all the grade materials availible to her for testing, some schools give each teacher the whole kit, some schools the teachers borrow the materials from a teacher of older kids.
One would think that one could show the achievement testing and tell the teacher - hey, get the ball rolling, get the kit for older grades ready when you sit down and don't make my kid go through the whole thing. But that almost never works. Aim for the more achievable goal of finding out how things are done at the school and getting the teacher to commit to going to the next step if your daugher ceiling out on the material on hand.
I guess I knew this would happen, but come on, things that she was doing at one are being done at five?
I promise that those other kids are normal, but it's instructive to wonder - if this is how I feel about those other kids, what must my daughter be thinking? My son was able to articulate that he felt frustration and despair. I didn't (really) think that 5 year olds could possibly feel those things so things had to get a lot worse before they got better at my house. I can be stubborn!
Love and More Love,
Grinity
