Last week, we ventured over to the public school to meet with a Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Simpson, so Sofia could take the standard reading (DRA2) and math assessment tests given at this time of year.
Unfortunately, the original Kindergarten teacher she had been assigned to probably chucked the original assessment paperwork. It would have been nice to have something better as a benchmark than the information she verbally relayed to Mrs. Simpson, that she recalled she was "advanced" because she knew all her letters.
I don't know how they go from talking about Kindergartners in terms of do they know their letters and do they know what a book is for, to -now we're going to test how many words you can read per minute with less than two mistakes and we will also measure whether you have the capacity to notice you made a mistake and the sophistication of the method you choose to determine if you made a mistake or to figure out how to read a word you don't readily know while we distract you with pictures. Also, we will be judging your cadence, inflection, page turning and so on. Did I mention, we will be timing you here with this stop watch. And then of course you will be required to demonstrate your comprehension of what you read, retelling portions of the story in the sequence that makes the most sense to us, not you, including the characters names that we expect .....
The test was a little brutal to say the least. On two accounts. The test itself and Sofia's mouth, spewing inappropriate statements accented with delusions of grandiosity, comments about vomit (2), and condescending attempts to overpower the teacher with her grandiosity.
Although I was careful not to fill Sofia's head with any kind of expectations (nor delusions) as to her performance, as soon as we walked through the door she was hell-bent on showing that teacher that she knew how to read circles around her and that she could even administer the test to herself. I don't know how a watermelon can grow from an acorn tree, but that's how I felt sitting on that little Kindergartner chair outside the door of the classroom listening to things coming out of her mouth --
"I"m not in Kindergarten, I'm in first grade". (Why did I tell her that?!)
"Oh, that's too easy. That's a preschool book. I need a chapter book". (No, she is no where near ready to read a chapter book).
"This morning ... I vomited". (This was true, but it was only water. She had been on an eating strike the day before).
"Your dog looks like someone vomited on him". (... crawl in a hole and die).
"1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,20,22,24,26,28,30."
Recount -"17. Oh it's an odd number not even!" (She may not know how to count, but damn it, she knows her odd and even numbers).
I didn't know what the hell to say when the teacher came to talk to me, but I could tell she wasn't quite looking at me with the same feelings she'd had when I'd first arrived. I just wanted to say, "I have nothing to do with this. Really, do you think I teach her to be overconfident and arrogant and to accuse people of having filthy, vomitty stuffed animals in their classroom! I swear, it's not me. Oh, and she can't really read chapter books, but you could probably tell, huh". But, I just didn't say anything and tried not to make eye contact.
--oo--
So after talking to the teacher and then later reviewing the score sheets, it appears that Sofia is about average with the majority of Mrs. Simpson's Kindergarten class in reading. She placed her at a Level 4 on the DRA2 test which apparently means that she is at "benchmark for the end of Kindergarten" or "beginning 1st grade level". This is in fact where I thought she might be in my own subjective assessment of her reading. And, despite the fact that Sofia's actually read more fluidly than she does most of the time, meaning, she read as well as she possibly could, I came away with the feeling that the teacher didn't really want her to place any higher than that. She said she began to test her for the next level, Level 6 (places her somewhere further along a 1st grade reading level, I think), but abandoned the test saying she just wasn't able to do it. The thing is, that once something is not new for Sofia anymore (this was the third test) she gets DISTRACTED. I'm guessing she wasn't reading fast enough and may have lost her place once because she stopped to look at the pictures too long. However, the material I heard her reading didn't reflect the complexity of the words, I know she's able to read.
So, it was a mixed bag, it was a miracle she tested as well as she did. After all, I wouldn't have been surprised if she had just outright refused to read at all. On the other hand, under the perfect circumstances and if all the stars where aligned, I think she could have placed higher. It also made me a little sad that she has probably worked twice as long (not even counting preschool) on her reading as (I'm generalizing) probably most of the Kindergartners in Mrs. Simpson's class, to end up at the same level. It kind of supports my feeling that she wouldn't have done as well as she could in a class setting without the individual attention. So, in this sense, it's also a victory for homeschooling.
The math assessment involved guessing how many items where in a pile and then counting stuff and then figuring out what would happen if some pieces where added in or taken away as well as a few verbal questions. Not very sophisticated. In this, the teacher vaguely told me she placed slightly ahead of the average group in her class. Ironically again though, she made mistakes while counting due to her never ending list of distractions, in this case her own grandiosity, but she wasn't tested on more advanced addition or even time telling or money counting or something.
So overall, I felt the tests showed that she struggles with execution but failed to show all of her knowledge.
After I got over the feeling of wanting to crawl in a hole an die of embarrassment, I was very proud of her. She wasn't intimidated at all and if she was, she stuck to her guns and used her new found sense of grandiosity to fuel her engines. She read more fluidly than she usually does, and she had to fight through her distractions for some of those math answers as I've often seen them go terribly wrong at home.
No comments:
Post a Comment