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    #30432 11/13/08 10:50 PM
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    Belle Offline OP
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    Hello all - I am looking for advice concerning DS5. He has SPD and Dyspraxia and due to his needs and lack of programs in our area, we decided to homeschool for Kindergarten this year. He has an IEP for both speech and OT and I drive him in for his sessions each week to the neighborhood school. I am ex-teacher in my county and know that IEP meetings can be nuts and I called an IEP meeting at the beginning of the year to let the team know I was homeschooling and to request achievement testing (we have done the SB test and he scored very high in several areas and low in some areas and the tester stated that his SPD was definitely an issue and suggested that we look into achievement testing as well to maybe help us figure out just where he lies). At the time, our county allowed homeschoolers to come in and attend the one day a week pull out gifted program but thanks to budget cuts, that is no longer. They informed me at the meeting of this and then stated they felt that testing would be useless since there are no services to offer him...I pushed back stating it would be extremely useful since I would be the one teaching him and I honestly had no clue achievement wise as to where he was. I came away from the meeting with everyone stating they would not do testing and I though ok, maybe I can figure this out.
    Fast forward to today - we have been homeschooling for about 2.5 months and I currently feel like I am throwing whatever I can at the wall and seeing what sticks as far as trying to figure out just what levels he is on. We got Singapore Math and we did the assessment you can do before you buy and he was handling 2nd grade level just fine so we decided to go with the 1b workbook first in hopes of building up his confidence level and I was worried that there were some gaps in his knowledge and wanted to make sure that he didn't miss some good foundation lessons - dumb idea...he finished that workbook in less than a month and every other word was, "this is too easy" and so now we are on to level 2 - again, I am hearing -"too easy"...I have been pulling several different materials I have collected from my years of teaching to do reading and he has been speeding through everything. Out of curiousity, I gave him the complete dolch reading word list through to 3rd grade and he rambled each and every word off with no issues and I have NO clue how in the world he learned half of the words. I have pulled out 2nd grade chapter books (reading is not his love - math and science are)and he is reading and comprehending them and he is bored, bored, bored. We have been doing 2nd grade I-Science and he is way past most everything in the workbook...so I have been throwing in everything including the kitchen sink....how in the world do I figure out where to start with him without feeling like we are skipping past some basic building blocks?
    Does achievement testing give you an idea as to what academic levels a child might be on? If my little guy is able to do math on a much higher level, I want to be able to offer this to him, I just have no idea as to how to go about figuring out where to start. How far would you push in demanding that the county give your child achievement testing? Sorry to ramble- I am just a wee bit frustrated because I so very much want to try to meet his needs, but am at a loss as to how to figure out where to begin without just throwing a dart at the board and saying, hmmm, let's try 5th grade or how about 4th. I am an early childhood educator and all of my special studies and continued educational training have all been in early childhood so I am at a loss. Thanks for any help or guidance!

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    I had the same problem with placing DS7 for homeschooling last year. Don't panic! smile

    Some of it is just an adjustment in how we think about teaching. I gave DS7 (then 6) the Singapore placement test, and realized he was teaching himself the math--math he'd never before attempted to do!--from the test questions! "How am I supposed to work with THAT?!?" I thought. crazy

    But you figure it out. It might be good to have a conversation with your DS about how Mom is learning right along with him, and so if HSing is going to work, you're going to have to work as a team. "I'm bored," isn't a very helpful, team-oriented comment. More specific info about why he's bored might be helpful though.

    Consider that it may be the subject matter or form of teaching you're using more than the level of work that's boring him. It might be useful to take your DS to the library and choose what he wants to read or do. For math, maybe you buy a bunch of Singapore workbooks at levels ranging from 2-5, say, and just let him do whatever he feels like doing. Or maybe you need to let your math work grow out of science experiments or something. Not all kids like workbooks. Not all kids need to follow a curriculum in a lockstep form. (Said the control freak who is still learning to let go...) wink

    The first year is a time of experimentation. You WILL make mistakes about placement and style of teaching. It's natural and virtually unavoidable. If he understands that you're learning, too, and that trying your best for him, the mistakes won't matter.

    Finally, I strongly recommend that you don't worry about gaps. He's 5! Math at the K-3 level is pretty doggone basic arithmetic. There's not a lot of room there for gaps!

    Your goal for this year should be to challenge your child, to do your best to make learning fun. Not "party-time" fun, but "I have to work at this" fun. If that means that you give him the level 4 workbook (or 3 or whatever), then so be it. You can always check out the lower level workbooks and slip in bits of them if you see that he's missing something along the way. I doubt if you'll need to do much with them, though. If a kid can add 4 digits, he doesn't really need to practice adding 3 digits. Even in Singapore--which doesn't have much repetition--a lot of the curriculum is this sort of move up from step 1 to the slightly-longer-but-same-idea step 2.

    As for testing, if you can get the school to do it, then you absolutely should. Achievement testing has been useful to me. But I wouldn't bang my head against that wall for too long if it isn't moving. If money is an issue for the school, then it may just be a lost cause. You can figure this out without it if you and your son communicate well.

    All the best to you! HTH! smile


    Kriston
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    You may find the book "Developing Math Talent" useful. The authors (Assouline & Lupkowski-Shoplik) describe an approach called Diagnostic Testing-Prescriptive Instruction. The first step is to determine aptitude with an above level test. If the child scores >50th percentile you analyze the missed items and the student studies the topics not yet learned. This is followed by post-testing and if the student scores >85 percentile you go to the next level.

    I think this approach makes sense for topics outside of math as well. You may be able to get an idea of aptitude using the Stanford Workbook with practice tests if the school won't help.

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    Belle,

    I had a very hard time not smiling while reading your post. I can hear your frustration and your uncertainty in your words. I know that you are pulling your hair out, while worrying how to teach your son. But all I could think while reading was, "God, what a wonderful year your son is having!" Look at it from his point of view. There may be gaps here or there (but I doubt it at the rate his is learning. He will self-fill-in any would be gaps!) But think about how much he has learned in a few short months compared to what he would be doing in a regular school? It is amazing!

    So my advice, from someone who has never done what you are doing but is completely impressed by it, is keep doing whatever it is you are doing. Let him stretch his legs intellectually and run until he hits something that slows him down. Then see if he will chew on it awhile. You want him to be challenged, so that he knows how to buckle down and apply himself. And if that is 4th or 5th grade material, then so be it.

    grin It sounds really wonderful to me!


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    I had the same difficulty determining what level my son was at for different subjects when he was 5, especially reading. I remember looking for online reading tests, having him read from dolch word lists or spelling out the words for him to see if he could identify the words because he was fidgety at that age and didn't want to sit still long enough to do a reading test and would complain that his eyes were too tired. I ended up using book lists that gave a reading level of the books he could read independently and I also typed paragraphs that he had read independently into Microsoft Word to get the Flesch-Kincaid reading level, but occasionally my son would somehow manage to read things with only a few errors that came up a 12th grade Flesch-Kincaid reading level when I know he was not able to read everything at that level.

    My son saw a developmental pediatrician for the first time the month he turned seven. When she asked me what grade levels he was working at I told her I didn't really know since we didn't really follow a curriculum, so she had him tested by an educational psychologist. When my son homeschooled for first grade, I just let him continue to read his science encyclopedia for reading practice because that is what he chose to read and I bought a math dictionary that he looked at but didn't seem that interested in, but I think this must be how he scored so high on the math portion on the WIAT when he had not done very much work with math. I also bought the Singapore math workbooks for different grade levels and let him choose what he wanted to work on when I could get him to do math. He did more "mental math" than anything else because of the difficulty with writing. I had to act as his scribe for math to get him to work on anything that required writing a lot of numbers especially when he got to long division.

    I know that not very many questions are asked at each grade level on the WIAT, but I found the information I got from this test helpful even though the educational psychologist said my son really needed to be tested over more than one session because he complained that he was tired while taking the test. I was also told that they ran out of time before my son missed enough questions to stop the test but the one session with the educational psychologist was all our insurance would pay for and I don't know how we managed to get that. The developmental pediatrician said the same insurance company refused to pay for this testing for another child.

    The WIAT showed that my son was grade levels ahead of the grade level he should have been in even though he didn't spend much time on math. I found that he could indeed work on math at the higher level with no problem as long as I acted as his scribe most of the time, but we still didn't spend much time on math because I didn't understand why he didn't want to do math the one way I had learned in school and the only way I could show him. The way he did it sometimes seemed backwards to me but he came up with the right answers. He would ask me why he couldn't do a math problem a different way or would ask me questions that I couldn't understand and it was like we couldn't communicate when it came to math sometimes. It was like he spoke a different language and I just wanted him to do it my way and get it over with. He learned so differently from the way I learned and there were many times I felt totally incompetent as a homeschool mom because of math, but I knew it would be worse for him in our public school so I didn't give up.

    Math was the one subject that I thought I needed to push him in because the WIAT showed he could do it. He just preferred science and social studies and literature and language arts and so did I, and there were so many days we just didn't get around to doing math.

    If I had only known about Aleks when my son was younger, I think we could have avoided the math battles and maybe he would even like math. I discovered that my son did some math problems the way my husband does them without being shown how to do it that way and my husband really liked math as a child and was competing against older students in math competitions in middle school. One of my sisters also loved math and took a lot of higher level math courses that I didn't take, but my poor kid had to deal with me trying to teach him math when I didn't have the thorough understanding of math that I needed to help him do it the way he needed to do it.



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