Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Disappointing p/t meeting- what to do if anything

Okay so after a whole weekend agonizing over next steps, my dh suggested mentioning to the teacher at drop off that we were puzzled by the progress card and would like to share some stuff with her via email or a direct meeting if she has time. We both wrote down the points we wanted to mention in our email or meeting so I feel prepared. Basically, we are going to ask for her help in getting our dd to come out of hiding and really show what she loves so she can grow her curious mind at school. Since dd is going to have the same teacher next year, we feel it would help if we shared with her info on the dd we know at home. Another thing we did was buy a copy of the brain quest workbook that the teacher mentioned she uses at school. The store did not have the pre-k/k version that she uses but a first grade version. Dd leafed through it at the store and declared that we should buy that instead of k as she can easily do this stuff. A good news, dd started to read whole sentences this weekend. I wrote about 10 sentences for her using a mix of phonetic and sight words and while she was slow, she read them all without any help. She is excited that soon she would be able to read 1200 pages book- yeah big dreamer I know. Thanks everyone for your help.

Sounds like a great plan - let us know how it goes!

pbear

What is the point of sending your child to this preschool if the teacher can be so wrong?

You should probably find a different preschool.

22b, but for this one thing ( and I agree it is a big one), we do like the school. It is a stress free alternative education type school. The children spend 2-3 hours each day outside out of the 6.5 hour school day. They are flexible with hours and prorate tuition accordingly. Dd only attends 3 full days. They have an excellent science teacher and an art and drama teacher, dd adores both of them and has so much fun in their classes. It is a small school and dd interacts regularly with children upto age 13. Middle schoolers actually read to their assigned primary partners every week. I could go on and on. Even when I picked this school, I had my doubts about the teacher and fortunately most of my concerns were ill- founded. Hopefully, the issue is just dd not showing her ability and not the teacher not noticing them. That said, if things do not improve much and if dd starts to lose her spark, we would not heaitate to look for another school.

Lovemydd, has your DD been always a "hider" or is this a new behavior?

ETA: It's so heartwarming to hear that your DD is excited about reading literature.

Polarbear, thanks for your advice and I will update on how things go.
Mana, this is how my dd is. She spends a lot of time thinking about stuff to figure things out and once she has it she moves on. She feels no need to show anyone what she knows. And while she is mastering a new skill she will practice in hiding. Even when she was an infant, I have walked in on her practicing some new skill and she will stop as soon as she sees me. The only way you know that she knows something is by observing her apply it somewhere. Then if you question her, she will reveal what she knows. Also she has a strange way of tackling challenging problems. I will give you an example. One day she asked me how tall our house is. I told her each floor is about 3 times her height and we have two floors. So go figure it out. She completely ignored me and walked away, very typical. A few hours later she asked me casually how tall she is. I said about 3 feet. Okay, she walked away. Comes back after a few hours and asks, what is 9 times 2. I asked her what was ten times 2. She answered then ran away. The next day, is 9 times 2 18. I said yes. A few days later she is drawing a picture of our house and talking to herself about how the house is 18 feet high. And that's how I knew she got the answer. How can a teacher figure this out with 10 other kids to attend to? I actually asked her if her teacher knows what she can do in math. She replied that she is keeping it a secret. Otherwise the teacher might ask her challenging questions that she might not know the answer to. I told her that there is a ton of stuff she doesn't know and will learn and it is completely okay to not know something. In fact that was one of the reasons to go to school. She has been working on the first grade brain quest workbook today and she wants me to show it to her teacher so she will know.
Sorry this got long. Helps to write to sort out my own thoughts.

Hi Lovemydd, I hope we didn't make you feel bad for not saying anything at the conference -- I really can see how you would be shocked into no response. And I agree with polarbear that saying nothing can be a good thing. In fact, I have forced myself to bite my tongue and not say anything at meetings because I don't want to agree with anything that I might regret.

Your DD sounds similar to my DS9. He had perfectionist tendencies even as an infant! He wouldn't join in on any activity until he was sure he could do it, which meant a lot of watching. His preschool teacher was the complete opposite of yours, though, and she got him right away. She was the first person to tell us that our child would likely need to be grade skipped in the future.

The only reason we knew our son could read was because we caught him correcting us when we misread something to him. He wouldn't show what he could do if you asked him. Now, as a 5th grader, he still does not like to stand out. He likes to blend at school. This made advocacy more difficult, because the teacher sees a happy kid who fits in fine. One of the more shocking things we heard from his K teacher was that she thought DS might be verbally delayed. This was a kid whose vocab at the time probably rivaled the average 10yo. With these hiders, it does take more to get the teacher to see.

It's hard to say how much you need to work with the preschool teacher, but it will be good practice for grade school. Incidentally, when we got to kindy, what finally convinced the teachers was when they let DS test with the 2nd graders on the MAP test. When they were able to compare his scores to their 2nd graders, they're eyes opened.

Lovemydd - your daughter sounds a lot like my oldest son was when he was younger. we even caught him practicing to crawl only when on his own - he stopped as soon as he saw us! (this was at 9 months of age)

When he was in pre school we had the same problems - he rarely showed what he could do, and his reports reflected that. Eventually we removed him from the school (gifted pre and primary school) because he was trying to hard to fit in with the other kids and it literally broke him!

If I can share a few things that will hopefully help you, esp since you like everything else about the school:

1. If your daughter is happy, leave it and resign yourself to the fact that the reports are worthless to you. If she is not happy take immediate action at any time!
2. Understand that most schools won't know how to coax out the perfectionistic secretly hidden talents.
3. If you see any signs of regression or trying to be like the other kids, please don't wait - take her out or make an alternative plan immediately
4. In your focus with your daughter forget the academics unless she instigates and work hard on emotional and life skills - like what you said about it being okay to not know everything.
5. Find challenges outside of school for your daughter - things she needs to work hard at for herself. This has helped immensely with my son in being able to confidently show what he can do, and accepting his mistakes when they do come.

I wish someone had told me these things - like your husband I was convinced I needed to show the school who my child was - it caused so many angst ridden moments with the teachers and admin staff. I wish I had done it differently - but that's hindsight for you I guess

Stpauligirl, please don't think any of the comments here made me feel bad. I value the advice I get from you guys who have btdt. I do have to work on my issues with not being able to speak up in situations like this. Dd also does a lot of observing and that is how she learns best. Her Montessori teacher last year totally got her and my dd blossomed in her preschool. That teacher told us that our dd was a gem and she misses dd the days she is unable to attend school. So I went into this meeting kind of expecting something similar. One difference here is that dd gets a lot of time to interact socially with other kids and her 3 "best" friends who are a year older are neither reading nor doing advanced math.

Madoosa, thank you so much for all that great advice. I agree with all of it. She does go to tennis and boy is she bad. But for some reason she totally doesn't mind and in fact thinks she is great! I don't burst her bubble . I do plan to monitor her and if I sense either unhappiness or regression, I am prepared to act on the alternatives. You have helped me tremendously so thank you.