Well, conference was Monday and while it didn't go too badly, it was interesting to see how uncomfortable the teacher was during it. We got to see DD's CORE test results - both from the first time she took the test at the beginning of the year and when she took them a couple of weeks ago, but the teacher couldn't (wouldn't?) explain what they mean or their significance. Her score went from a 125 to a 171. The difference being that the second time she had gone through phonics lab and could pronounce more sounds and words than before. When we first asked her about this test we were told that there were 4 kids at DDs level, but they didn't have phonics holes. Now, apparently after the retest, her score is higher than everyone's by about 20 points. That is all we could find out from the teacher when we asked her to put the score into the context of what they expected out of kids in her class and the upper limit of the test.
The teacher asked how things were going for DD now that she was going to 1st grade for reading and when we said things were getting better, but she was still complaining about the math the teacher got really worried. We explained that the biggest issue seems to be that the teacher reads the directions aloud twice and makes the kids do all of the problems together to ensure they get them. This pace was sending DD over the edge. We got the agreement that DD could simply read the directions to herself and do the papers at her own pace and be given an enrichment page when she finished. She was reluctant to do this at first because she doesn't want DD to do a different topic than what the rest of the class is doing because she won't be able to help her with it if everyone else is doing something different from her. So, we decided that harder work within the same topic was fine, but was definitely needed.
Since then we have found out from DD that most of the really frustrating things have been taken away now that she goes to 1st grade for reading because she misses the main frustration activities and now that she can do math at her pace, she is happier as well.
So, it looks like we are moving in the right direction. We now have our fingers crossed that we stay on this path. (Knowing that this fix will only last for a short while, we'll take it while we've got it.
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