I spent all morning penning this letter to ds' K teacher, principal and school psychologist concerning out awful meeting last week where they told me that ds was possibly behind instead of ahead. I thought a lot about not even responding back, but I felt I needed to. Tell, me what you think:


"I wanted to thank each of you for taking the time to meet with me last week about DS6. I know extra meetings are tiring at the end of a long school day, and we are blessed that DS is in such a caring environment.

Last Tuesday, I'll admit I left our meeting self-conscious that I had given off a negative impression as a parent who is unrealistic about her child's abilities and expectations from the school. If I came across as difficult or pushy, I do apologize. It was really surprising for me to see the difference in how DS is performing and testing at school vs. home. I know it makes my concern that DS is ahead seem biased and unlikely. We try to be realistic and see l DS, but of course we are still seeing things as his parents. He is an imperfect kid with a lot of extra silliness, impulsivity, irritability, and tendency to easily surrender. We have never had DS tested or assessed so I don't have any scores or numbers of DS presents outside of school. All I have is anecdotal stories about DS's precocity: he read at 2.5, he started math around 3, he worked on 1st grade workbooks at 4, he is currently obsessed with US and world geography, after learning about Ben Franklin in class this year - he now wants to learn more about the inventions that Ben Franklin created and also has become interested in the 'founding fathers'. My husband and I have never expected our kids to be early learners. We have helped DS investigate his interests because this is his love, but we have never pressured him to focus primarily on academics. It is, as we have learned, his "play" to ponder "why" to most anything.

As discussed in the meeting, DS is excited at the prospect of working on AR books (he loves to earn points), and we already started working on Xtramath at home. Working with DS on Xtramath has been eye-opening for me. The first day we started, he had such awful test anxiety that I had to shut the program down. Our 10-key doesn't seem to work with the Xtramath program, so DS had to hunt and peck the numbers on the regular keys. The combination of doing this and not knowing the answers in a short amount of time was incredibly distressing for him (he completely froze, broke into tears and refused to continue the questions). We have never worked on math memorization, he has just always been able to recalculate problems in his head, so this is a real opportunity for learning. What I learned, however, is that DS has a lot of test anxiety that I had thus been unaware. I'm wondering if that could account for some of the differences we see in home vs. school.

Although I had originally hoped to get a better understanding of where DS was math-wise, I think any extra evaluations at this time would just cause him undue anxiety. Right now, we have compromised the Xramath where he tells me the answers and I type them in until he is a little more confident. I have offered to just leave Xtramath be, but he is motivated to keep at the challenge. I see this as a great opportunity to work with him on managing this anxiety. We were aware that he hits a wall when he feels he doesn't know something, but we had been unaware that he would get so paralyzed in recalling familiar work when put in the context of an 'official' test.

I hope that this year that DS can stretch to become more confident in school. I also hope we can help DS master his test/performance anxiety, as tests will always be a part of the formal schooling process. Any advice is welcome.


Thanks again so much for your time, committment, and concern."

Last edited by Evemomma; 10/16/12 12:57 PM.