Hi, my son seems to be in the same boat as your 1st graders. He has a great teacher but we live in beautiful Massachusetts with MCAS garbage. We're in a poor community with mostly elderly voters. The schools are paid for primarly by the state with the town pitching in a whole 7% of the bill. Needless to say the teachers, no matter how good, are required by law to reach the slowest students and bring them up to the lowest acceptable standard. They do this the only way they can - they teach solely to those students and throw the average and above average students bits to challenge them when they get a chance. (That's only if you have a good teacher. Last year's teacher was a nightmare.) The braindead principal suggested 4-H if we want to challenge our son because "there's nothing the school can do." A gifted program would take a miracle.
With that said, I'm very thankful for the teacher my son has this year. She has more energy than all of the other teachers at her school combined. The kids are so excited to learn and she loves volunteers. We talked with her last week and she's agreed to start our son on a SAR reading program (not sure what SAR stands for). I had a major flashback when I recognized the box of colored leaflets as something I did in third grade! The program divides the reading levels by color. A student picks a 4 page leaflet from their level and reads the 2-3 paragraph story, then answers the 15-20 questions. Then the kid self-corrects the answers from a cheat-sheet found in the same box (hopefully the kids don't notice that the teacher isn't watching them work at all times)
The leaflets are still a lot easier than the books our son reads at home but it sure beats the 3 sentence stuff he works on with the rest of the class.
Let me know if you want to know more information on this. I know it's old stuff (I did the program 25 years ago) but it might be helpful.
All the students in the school work on a self-paced computer program called LEXIA (? not sure of the spelling). The draw-back of the program is that a teacher or director of the program decides on the kids levels. Our son's director was happy to report that they bumped him way up to reading hard words like muffin and pancake. AAAHHH. They have absolutely no idea of his abilities.
