Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy First grade update

DS has been in first grade for about a month now and I see signs that he's getting a little too comfortable there, do you know what I mean? I went in for mathlab and I saw how he daydreamed through "morning opening" which is, admittedly, a mindnumbing exercise in repetition about the order of the days of the week and why we capitalize the names of the months, etc. I think it's a good thing that he only has another month and a half of first grade to go! He is beginning to tune out again. His handwriting is much faster now but sloppy.

Oh, and he did poorly on a spelling test--see if you can figure out why. Here is an excerpt:


He also missed several questions on a math test about time because the pictures of the clocks didn't make any sense. For example, the time 3:30 was pictured as the minute hand on the 6 and the hour hand on the 3 (instead of between the 3 and the 4.) He was asked to draw what the clock would look like one hour later. Since the hands didn't make sense, he only drew the hour hand one hour later and didn't draw a minute hand at all...

Okay, I admit it, other than possibly substituting correctly for right, I'm stumped. What's the answer?

Same problem here several years ago:-)
Can't figure out the spelling though ???

I'm guessing it's D. Not that underlined is spelled wrong, but that the answer is that all the words are spelled correctly above. The underlining means different things in the different questions--tricky. Am I right?

I got the spelling! First, there are NO cirles to fill in. Second, since none of the words is spelled wrong, there is nothing to mark on the paper. So, naturally, the teacher doesn't know that he knows the spellings are correct.

Cathy, am I close? And, yeah, we get the clock thing as well. In addition to the fact that the teacher wants the hands exactly the lenght that she draws them and the arrow at the end has to be filled in completely instead of just an open arrow. Eek!


Oops, sorry, ACS, I double-crossed you. No, that doesn't sound right - posted over you? whatever, sorry

I believe the answer was d, but it didn't correspond to the question because none of the UNDERLINED words were spelled incorrectly. Plus there were no "circles" to fill in. But clearly that is a stupid question, designed to confuse rather than to test knowledge/mastery. I hate that.

I doubt it was designed to confuse; it just wasn't well thought out or piloted in the classroom before published.

Well, there actually were circles to fill in on his paper (I just couldn't type them in my post), but he said none of the underlined words appeared to be spelled incorrectly--including the word "underlined"--so he figured he was mistaken and just randomly guessed.

By the way, this is from SRA/McGraw-Hill.

Personally, I don't like this approach to spelling anyway. I think reading misspelled words just confuses kids and then they remember the misspellings.

The questions says find a word that is not spelled correctly. Of course he didn't choose anything because everything is spelled correctly. For him (d) was just a sentence not another option.

Cathy, we posted at the same time. I am glad he is almost done with 1st grade. I am afraid that you will be in a similar situation next October though