Last year, DS had a first grade teacher who made him do grade level math with no differentiation. She told me she was going to have him do a second grade level workbook (from a different curriculum) instead, but never did it. We transferred schools mid-year, and the new teacher put him on the computer to do above-level testing and almost everything came back at a 3rd-5th grade level for math. She sat with him everyday for a few minutes and taught him the concepts that the test showed he needed to learn. She asked paras to help him. The school had an open format with very few walls and there were paras everywhere. She printed out worksheets online of those concepts that testing showed he needed to work on next. When she was instructing the other kids she put him on the computer to do Adapted Mind. She was amazing but she admitted it was very difficult.
Now he is in second grade and the teacher's idea of differentiation is to give the kids logic sheets which are basically word problems and don't necessarily even involve that much math. It is definitely not above grade level in terms of math. While I think it's great for DS to do some of these types of problems, he also needs to learn new math. I threatened to pull him and homeschool and now they are having him do Khan Academy on the computer (he's at the end of 5th grade) and some workbooks that I sent in. He is completely teaching himself, watching the videos on Khan. It's a terrible situation, although it beats him being forced to sit through second grade math lectures. They refuse to accelerate him more than one year because of district policies.
For reading, he has been assessed as being the same reading level for the past two years. I don't think there are even any reading ability groups. Luckily the teacher allows him to read books brought in from home.
