I talked to my dd yesterday about writing a letter to her teacher, and she wants to. I think it will be something along the lines of "Dear Mrs. X, I like princesses and candy. I have two cats. I can't wait for first grade. Love, DC" But of course, if she wants to write something else, so be it.
I think that's great. Especially combined with a little note from the parents. It lets the teacher know that you are invested in child owning her experience at school and you will not be the dreaded helicopter parent. It has the added benefit of letting the teacher know in advance that your child's writing, printing, spelling skills are already at least at grade level, if not higher. My, you are sneaky! I like it!
We'll try to write a short letter mentioning a couple of book series (perhaps books dd reads on her own and some books we read together?);
Personally, I would only include the title of a book I was sure she could easily read and answer questions from. The teacher won't care what level book you are reading to her. Her job is to determine at what level the child should be reading, with good comprehension.
mention that she likes ballet, singing and science, and that she can be slow to warm up, but will quickly get over that and be *very* social (I don't know that I'll mention she's likely to do this if she gets bored.)
Good call.
I think based on the general tone of advice here, I'm not going to mention academics directly at all. The school already has some information on that based on the request we had to make to enroll our daughter in first grade. The principal seemed aware that she'd need differentiation (he was actually the first to use the word in our conversation). During our conversations we also did not mention the words "gifted" or "grade-skip". I'll assume it will be passed on. If it's not, we can address it after a couple of weeks.
Another very good call. We have an extremely supportive principal who for the most part, understood how different our kids were. Even in a community where almost all the kids are *gifted*.
Unfortunately, that didn't always translate to the teachers for various reasons.
But no sense worrying about that now. You could have an excellent teacher who naturally takes care of the situation without any intervention from you.
You'll just have to wait and see.
If you do end up having a problem, keep communicating with parents on this forum. There are a lot of parents who have great success in advocating for their children's needs, who are members of this online community.
