Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Parenting 102 - SOOO Proud!!!

Our older daughter has struggled with reading.  She loves to read, but she struggles with comprehension.
We live in Central Jersey, not far from Rutgers.  Rutgers offers a very esteemed summer reading program for 4th &5th graders.  I had looked into enrolling our daughter, but then realized that they would spend two weeks on "Henry Huggins" by Beverly Cleary and three weeks reading "A Cricket in Times Square".

I remembered my daughter's teacher mentioning "Cricket" at Back to School Night.  An email to the teacher confirmed that they would indeed be reading that book in May. It seemed silly to pay $400 for her to re-read a book she read a month or two earlier, so I asked her Language Arts teacher and her Basic Skills teacher if they knew of any other summer reading programs.  I also asked what her last Reading Stars score was.

Our school system utilizes a program called Reading Stars to get monthly reading levels for all of the kids.  The kids independently go on one of the classroom computers and access the program, which basically takes about 7 minutes and is some fill in the blank questions (vocabulary) and other questions are multiple choice based on some text the children read (comprehension).  The program apparently adjusts and gets gradually more difficult as the child shows increased skill.  It is somewhat controversial, and teachers would prefer to do a guided reading with the children, but Reading Stars is faster, more streamlined, you can tests more students at one time, and it adjusts to the child's skill level, which you can't do with a DRA.
The last three months, our daughter's scores were: 4.6, 5.6, and 5.3.........................which means that she is reading above grade level!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Which means that I let her use a homework pass last night for the first time EVER!!!!!!!!!!!

And her dad took us all out to dinner!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WE ARE SO PROUD OF HER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!