Thank you everyone for your replies. My DH and I have differing opinions on the writing issue. He feels it is not as big of a deal as I feel it is. I notice all the time that DD has alot of misspellings of common sight words when she is writing. She does make sentences but it's the forgetfulness of spelling, capitalization, punctuation at this age level that bothers me. When she writes fast it gets worse. We go over it again and again yet she always forgets. Overall, she can make sentences and write paragraphs but without seeing the level of the class, I can't tell if she is doing that great. Her thoughts make sense to me when we talk about texts. I have always felt she understands what's going on. I was glad to see she did meet her growth targets after summer (even though she couldn't get above the score she had before).
However, my greater concern when we brought the issue up to DD's teacher is her latest response:
In high ability classrooms, we don’t just work on a vertical jump in reading, but focusing on reading at a deeper level. So, while we might be reading a novel that is a little lower than our current reading level, we are working on discussing and questioning at a higher, deeper level
This sends up a red flag for me as we had the "deeper understanding" talk with DD's last teacher when she said she wouldn't be able to do division and DD had to stay on low math.
She also says little lower. The novel is 4 levels lower than DD's ability level. Whoever heard of reading at a significantly lower level in order to gain a better understanding? DD says the questions are all easy (like Master of None stated - like what are the character's names, where are they at, etc. - low level). DD said there was no difficult discussion and she is not learning anything. One boy in the group doesn't even speak English that well. There can't be any difficult discussion with him there. Also, she admits the book is below DD's level but says she is committed to the text until November.
How can she say DD is reading at a higher level and she has placed her at a higher level, but at this time she needs to be in the lowest reading group to gain "deeper understanding"? And that is her answer to providing high ability services? I'm very frustrated.
