Family Matters
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Just got a call from DD's guidance counselor
She's in Kindergarten. Her teacher is concerned with her performance. She's not always focused and isn't keeping up with others. I'm so afraid that they are going to want to keep her back. The teacher has really high expectations (and I know we're in a good district, but I think her expectations are REALLY high). I've spoken to other friends in other districts and told them, what is expected of DD and they were like that was like 1st grade for us.
Sigh, I'm so worried, and being 35 weeks PG, I'm a hormonal mess.
Re: Just got a call from DD's guidance counselor
What to do:
Take her to get a hearing check up and also have her vision checked. THis could be a matter of a pair of ears that need to be cleaned and/or the fact she needs glasses.
Second off, a parent teacher conference. Take somebody with you if you wish; 2 heads/ears to listen can be vastly better than one.
Does she know her letters? Her numbers and her colors? Is she eating a good breakfast before she goes to school? is her lunch adequate for somebody her age?
Food consumption and academic performance are linked hand in hand.
Maybe suggest that she be placed in another teacher's kindergarten class and see how she fares there. SOmetimes it's the teacher and not the kid.:)
As a public school teacher myself, I say please consider working through some of these issues with your daughter before moving her out of the teacher's class. Honestly, parents today are too quick to blame the teacher,the class, the standards, etc instead of the kid, and you end up with kids who don't push themselves and teachers who are forced to dumb down their classes. Everybody loses.
if your daughter is in a class with higher standards than those of most kindergarten classes, I would say she is very, very, lucky. What subjects is she struggling with? Is there anything you can work on with her at home? When I was that age, I did terribly in school because I was bored, and daydreamed all the time. When my mom started working with me at home, I understood things better, and that helped me show more of an interest in class . In about a year, I went from being a terrible reader to one of the best readers in the class (and I'm an English teacher now).
i'm not saying there are no terrible teachers out there, or that your daughter's teacher is completely blameless. I just think you should exhaust every option before switching teachers. And try not to take it so hard...it's okay for kids to struggle I'm school once in a while. That way, at least you know they're being challenged!
. .
The call home to a parent about concerns of this type is a hard one to make. I know it hurts to hear your child isn't meeting the standards that her peers are.
I agree that you should schedule an appointment to hear them out- bring your husband or some other adult. Ask about "response to intervention" as well as the possibility of giving consent for a multifactored eval to discover what's going on. While you wait on the eval, you can have her hearing and vision checked.
It doesn't really matter what platitudes your friends offer about what goes on in their schools; your DD doesn't attend there and her classmates seem to be rising to the standards set.
I agree with most of the PP's here. The only thing I would emphasize is that she might just need extra help at home. I remember when I was in 5th grade, I really started to struggle with math. I had always been a good student and had excellent grades, so you can imagine how frustrating it was that I went from getting mostly A's and B's to getting D's and F's. My teacher gave my mom some workbooks for me to take home so I could do extra work at home, and eventually I started bringing my math grades up to B's.
Talk to the teacher and counselor first, and see what you might be able to do yourself at home to help your daughter before blaming the teacher and switching classes. I don't think anyone does their child a favor by bailing them out straight away simply because things get too hard. If she is still really struggling after getting extra help, then try switching her out to another class.
My advice would be to ask the school to test her for a learning disability.
They will ask that you take her to have her vision and hearing checked. In the meantime she will be tested the learning specialists.
Use the resources that your school has available to your advantage.
Look, some kids just need an extra year of development. You should be glad they're not trying to just push her through when she's not ready for the next grade. And it will be less hard on her self-esteem to be held back now as opposed to middle/high school. Is she one of the younger ones in her class, perhaps?
I say all this from the perspective of having tutored kids for EOG tests. A lot of schools are so focused on just getting them to pass by the skin of their teeth and then blame the teachers when they're dealing with kids who didn't even know the material they should have gotten one or two grades ago, and are now completely unable to keep up with their current grade. I get that it's hard to hear that your child is struggling in school, but it really could be as simple and easy as repeating kindergarten. Don't treat it like it's such a negative thing, or your daughter will pick up on that.
This may work for some kids. But if she does have a learning difference, more exposure to the teaching that isn't working isn't going to make it work better. She may need to be taught in a different way.
DS was dx'd with dyslexia in late first. His school used a whole language approach to RELA and it just didnt click for him. We ended up sending him to a special reading lab school that used Orton and he caught up in 2 1/2 years. He's on the Deans List now.
i agree with this completely. i'm also a public school English teacher.
what's the big deal about having your child repeat kindergarten? wouldn't you prefer this to happen and have her be absolutely ready to tackle first grade instead of setting her up for what could become year after year of not quite meeting the standards set for her? if she's not ready, she's not ready. there's no shame in that.
is she an august baby?
This isn't the worst thing in the world. DD went to K last year (2011-2012), and had similar issues. Her teacher was wonderful, worked with us and went above and beyond to help DD, and still at the end of the year asked me in for a conference to discuss DDs placement for this academic year. At the time, we were dead set on moving ahead to 1st grade. DD technically met all state benchmarks, I didn't want any stigma, I thought the teacher (while wonderful) had higher than necessary standards (which during the year we absolutely appreciated as it challenged the kids more than the baseline curriculum), all of that.
Fast forward to last September and the start of 1st grade. My kid struggled. Even with the summer to advance her reading and social skills, which she did do, it was rough. Three weeks into the year her 1st grade teacher calls me and says that DD just wasn't able to keep up and was showing signs of stress, and as a teacher this was a difficult call to make to a parent but she was heartsick at watching and knew something had to be done. Conferences back and forth with her, the principal, and the former K teacher...the end result of which is one Friday DD was in 1st grade, and the next Monday I walked her back to her old K classroom where she's been ever since.
And my daughter is THRIVING. She is probably both the oldest and tallest kid in the class (because she's 95th% in height and weight), but she neither notices nor cares. None of her friends, old or new, do either. She comes home happy, she wants to do homework, she's mastering skills that last year she just squeaked by on. I know what my friends' kids in 1st are doing, and it has become very obvious that we could have muddled through but she'll be so much more ready next year. The principal put it this way...one of the greatest things we can give our children, especially at this age, is the gift of time, and my kid needed it. I'm so thankful for caring, involved teachers because I couldn't see it until they helped me. They could have just ignored the problem and pushed her through.
I cried for weeks about this. I still choke up when I go to a K event and remember that we did this already, or see the 1st graders doing something I know DD would love. But overall I am so happy we made the right choice for her and that she has an amazing rather than stressful year in 1st grade to look forward to in the fall.
Good luck! Whichever way things go, as long as you're doing what's best for your DD, it'll work out!
THIS! I am a teacher and can tell you that when parents complain about a teacher being "too tough," they are dumbing down the curriculum for the whole class. I once worked for a private school that wouldn't allow any teacher to give a grade lower that a "B" because they wanted parents to be happy. Needless to say, I left that place.
On a side note, teachers see hundreds of students walk through their classes year after year and know if 1 student is not performing and the rest are, there is something wrong. Blaming the teacher is parent denial. Passing students in elementary school because a parent complained, is the reason why I had a 7th grader walk into my class not knowing how to read (this at a middle income public school).
Have a meeting with the teacher and ask...
1. What areas your daughter is struggling with.
2. How you can help improve her learning
3. What the State requirements are for first grader's to pass kindergarten; then get flash cards and whatever you need to help her meet those standards.
4. Get her hearing and eye's checked. Ask the school to evaluate her for any kind of disability.
5. If she is still struggling, give her a break and let her repeat kindergarten.
To be honest, She will be okay even if she is held back. None of the students will notice the age difference because it's only a year and every child develops differently. This doesn't mean there is anything wrong with her but not holding her back if recommended, will cause gaps in her abilities to preform in other grade levels. To those who have said, "What's the big deal? It's just kindergarten." This is really ignorant. Children learn to read in kindergarten and count. By first grade, the teacher will help develop literacy, but will NOT teach the basics of reading. If you miss out on that, you miss out on a lot. It is better to make sure that, that skill is learned well.