Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy When to rebel?

REBEL! This is ridiculous. lol. My son who is currently in Kindergarten (this is not my gifted kid...but he is bright) reads 2 years above grade level. THANKFULLY, they use the "AR" program at school...so when I said he needed harder books the teacher was willing to let him try a second grade level and let him stay there once he passed a few AR tests. So far he has taken about 10 and gotten 100 every time...so we are good. He can certainly choose to read easier books when he would like to, but he does not want to and I am glad he has a supportive teacher. BUT....if that had not been the case, I would have gone to the principal and district if need be. One of the jobs of a teacher is to provide rigorous instruction and practice. a book a year or two below where a student is...not rigorous.

Has he ever been giving a reading assessment like DRA or taken the online assessment in AR or STAR?

I like your original proposal. Since this is an assignment your DS is doing at home, you can let him do it on the books he's reading at home. Then just sit back and wait until the teacher decides to complain.


This is where my strategy of pruning bad arguments by refocusing on the school's mission comes in very handy: "My child does not come to school to make other children feel comfortable. My child comes here to learn."

Personally, I would just have him read what he wants and do the report on that, and send it in as if that were what he had been assigned. We did that with math worksheets when DS was in 2nd grade -- only a couple of weeks of that, and the teacher told us that she wasn't expecting him to do those worksheets that he brought home, it was just habit to give one to every kid.

We had this same issue, but with homework assignments. It was a hot mess at our house every night. I finally email the teacher and explained that homework was taking 2 damn hours every night because of the book selection, and could he just use whatever book he was already reading? Thankfully she had no issue with it!

We had this issue in 1st...in fact, after reading your post I looked at your location to see if you might be talking about the same teacher. We're not, which means there is more than one. Sigh.

Ours was in-class work, and when I talked to her she claimed that DS was not reading for comprehension, but only decoding so she wanted him to go down a couple of reading levels to make sure he could comprehend. Problem was, it was so simplistic he was getting frustrated with the questions because they were so obvious that he was having "but that couldn't possibly be the answer, it's too obvious" problem and getting stuck. And he found a couple of the books to be embarrassing.

We went back and forth on it for a while, with the teacher insisting I was overestimating his abilities, until finally I realized he wasn't being graded on any of it that it was actually the "enrichment, providing depth and complexity" that is promised in the TAG program. HA! (that is not the humorous "ha", but rather a disgusted one).

We rebelled and I told him not to worry about it anymore. That I knew it was frustrating and that as long as he was keeping up with reading at home, it was fine.

Obviously, there were more issues with this teacher. This was really only the tip of the iceberg. Thankfully, the administration was both willing and able to help us out, so we ended up having an OK year in the end.

I like your idea of having him review the books he's reading at home. I think that sends a powerful and, hopefully, constructive message.

At the end of the day, I think the real issue lies with assigning the kids a specific book. Why can't these teachers let them choose a book? Would the sky fall on their heads? I guess they don't want to risk having to read something new in order to grade the work...

Seriously. It's is so weird.

This has been our M.O. on pretty much every open-ended, "student determined" assignment-- right from the start.

So this is how my DD wound up discussing Langston Hughes' poetry in 3rd grade... even though it was (technically) a selection for middle school GT, reading middle and high school books in 6th grade for reports... doing research at the local university library for a 10th grade world history research project, etc. etc.


We just pretend like we "misunderstood" the directions. Whoopsie. Stupid us.

This is exactly what DS had to do last year in second grade. Each week they were given a book to read and had to do a one page worksheet on it. Except the books they started with were *below* 2nd grade reading level!

We eventually struck a deal with the teacher that he could read other, more reading-level-appropriate books, instead. We chose stories from D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths; they were relatively short, interesting to DS (who was currently immersed in Percy Jackson), and at a much higher reading level.

Of course, DS still didn't want to do the assignment, but at that point it didn't matter.

We rebelled and homeschool now.

Seriously, though, I would ask the teacher if your DS can write his journal on something else. I think the point of the exercise when they're this young is to learn to write a summary of a book, not necessarily the books themselves.

To be fair, imagine you're a teacher with 30 students, each of whom might be reading something you may never had read before. How would you know if they are doing a good job in writing a summary? I think (most) teachers love reading new books, but I can see how the logistics of obtaining the books and reading them *each week* might be difficult.

But a parent of a child you are trying to accommodate might be willing to "grade" the summary for the teacher.

This is one con for differentiation and why sending a child to a higher grade is easier on teachers.