Another vote for answering fully and honestly, but one thing I'd like to emphasise: I think it's helpful to tell them where his ZPD is, i.e. which things can he do with support but not yet alone? For one thing, this is where they should be teaching him; for another, it lets them know that you are capable of noticing what he can't do, and lets you show them that you're comfortable with him not being able to do things yet. Sometimes I have the impression with the pushy parents (you know, "them", not "us" :-) that they only want to see the amazing things their children can do and want to deny that there are things their children are in the process of learning and other things they're not yet ready to learn. I dare say teachers have seen this too :-)
CM
I totally agree - not only about letting them know where he should be taught but about what makes a parent a problem rather than an advocate! We were completely honest ala Bookratt, what he IS doing in terms of reading and what he likes. And then we did mention his writing issues and what we have done to help him with it and we pointed put some social behaviors which he could use some help on. But we punted in one area - math - he has a pretty good understanding of multiplication, division, x as a placeholder and he loves negative numbers. He even likes getting someone to help him figure out how many of his trucks in his imaginary world does he need to transport whatever item his factory is making - but he is just getting rote computation, like adding skip counting etc. I think for awhile he just didn't want to devote the brain space to learning it because he couldn't see the point - now he can. We just left it at he reads murderous maths. He needs to learn the rote stuff and from what I read here it is much harder to be persuasive in that situation.
I hate that there will likely be no response. Sending something out and not hearing anything just makes me THINK people are talking. I should probably get over that!!!
DeHe
