Thanks for the encouraging words, ladies!
Our meeting went all right. They actually seemed much more impressed by Benjy's math than his reading, which surprised me; I've always seen Benjamin's reading as his strong point. But whatever.
He'll stay in his "advanced" reading group with another child from K (who doesn't read like Benjy does, but somehow Benjy only got to level 27 in their DRAs as opposed to his private testing, which put him much higher). They have a reading specialist come and work with them for 20 minutes, four days a week; they pointed out that this is more than he would get in a first grade classroom for now.
And the kindergarten class is set to take their MAP testing (Measure of Academic Progress) in January, but they're going to do Benjy's MAP math assessment in December. If his math testing puts him at the right level (and it should, if he pays any attention at all), he'll be pulled out to first grade for math, probably the advanced first grade math group that meets with the gifted teacher. They told us that group is working on stuff like perimeter, which would be right up Benjy's alley.
We've all agreed to see what happens, and how he seems to be responding to the first grade classroom, and follow up again in January to consider a full-grade skip next fall.
I think this is a great solution for us. The thing that bothered me was that the principal is one of *those* principals -- she's a principal for the ages, the type of person you picture when you think "principal." It's hard to explain, but you'd know her if you saw her! Anyway, she kept talking about social and emotional impacts of a skip. *All* the recent research shows that for kids at this level, skips *are* the best thing you can do socially and emotionally.
Obviously there are some exceptions, but she was talking about this being a very risky move, which I just don't see it to be. I wanted to pull a bunch of papers out and wave them around but decided that, at this point, it would do more harm than good! So we'll wait for a while on that.
I guess I'm fairly happy, but they kept bringing up issues without proposing any possible solutions -- mainly Benjy's scatterbrainedness, a trait which he exhibits at home as well. They also pointed out his age-appropriate handwriting, which made me want to scream, but they didn't sound like that was a main concern for them. We're going to work on being more responsible for our own things at home, and we've been working on handwriting as well. Hopefully that will translate to the classroom; his writing is already seeing an improvement.
What an interesting road this is!
Mia
