Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Need Help with Educational Plan

Yippee! 2 and a half hours! Wow, they must have found lots of knowledge to test. It's really hard not to go down the road of trying to guess what's coming and getting more and more emotional. Better to harness the emotion and make a spread sheet:

If they say this ----- I say this

The waiting is hard, and the meetings are hard. Remember to nurture yourself as much as possible.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

Mon, Thanks for your reply. It really got me thinking about a lot of things as I been preparing for my meeting today. Teacher received her gifted certification just recently, this is her 3rd year teaching gifted, but she has been teaching for a long time. I honestly don't think anyone in our school is that great with the requirements of the gifted program. There is not a lot of gifted children and I think parents just follow the program that is given rather than look for individual accomodations.

My DS13 went through the elementary school here too and looking back over his EP's they really were written the same way and nothing was done to accomodate his individual learning pace. At the time, I really didn't know a lot about gifted either and didn't push for proper accomodations. This caused him to struggle later on with learning how to learn, having the motivation and drive when things got challenging etc. He is now on a good path, but I think things would have been better if he was properly accomodated during elementary school, thus the reason I push for it now for my DD.

I wouldn't fault the teacher for not knowing about the program or thinking she needs to accomodate individual learning as there are no teachers in our school that do this as they haven't been asked to previously, but my concern is that now that things are being brought to light, will she be able to accomodate my DD adequately in her classroom?

The principal is someone who I believe has children's best interest at heart and she did allow the first ever grade acceleration at her school for my DD. She also monitors and comments regularly on how well it has worked for DD.

The psychologist came back on Thursday for another 1 hour math testing session. My DD shared the tester indicated at some point her "fluency" of math wasn't very fast, while she could do the problems, she didn't work fluently. That sure didn't sound like an appropriate thing for psych to share, anymore than the other day when she shared with her the reason for the test was her mother didn't think she was being challenged in math. After math test was finished, a reading specialist came to test her reading/comprehension/spelling etc. DD said this was an hour test.

I certainly can't say they didn't test her. I'm really looking forward to the meeting this afternoon to go over results and plan. I really wish I had results in hand before meeting though as feel so unprepared for any issues that may come up and I'm sure they will have already developed their own idea of plan seeing they have the test results. Fingers crossed for a good meeting.

Well I'm hanging up my advocacy hat for a while. I really need a rest and a chance to focus on other things. The Diagnostic Assessment of Reading had DD8, 4th grade, with oral reading on 8th grade level, word recognition on 7th, silent reading comprehension and word meaning on 6th and spelling on a 5th. Teacher offered to give her 1 novel a quarter, books are on 5th grade level, but somehow (?) the extra enhancement activities the teacher provides increase the level to 6th grade. Spelling, vocabulary will come out of the 4th grade instructional book.

She was also administered the Key Math 3 Diagnostic Assessment and had overall grade equivalent of 8.1 and 99.8% percentile, with basic concepts, operations and applications all being over 99%. Teacher very reluctantly offered to give her a pre-test of the chapter material with no workable plans in place as to how she would proceed if DD proved successful. They encouraged teacher to give tests to all kids in the class and let the ones who pass, move on to pre-test on the next chaper, etc. Sounds good in theory, but you could potentially end up with several children being on a different level in math. The teacher felt this wouldn't be an issue as to use her words, there were no children in class, DD included who were ready to move on in math.

DD also scored top scores on her state standardized testing last year and state benchmark testing this year. Teacher still not impressed reminded us that DD was not the top of her class. Funny thing is she sure thought very highly of her before todays meeting.

I think we just need to hang in there and finish this year up.