Just a thought, but by allowing your daughter to know that she can pick and choose which assignments she does at home can affect her in the future. She feels she has the power to decide what is important and what isn’t. Your teacher may be sending those ‘busy assignments’ home to help teach responsibility and time management.

Oh, I am so sad for you and your son. I am just beginning on the reading journey with my five year old. I have a feeling we will be in the same boat as you. Good luck. Maybe you could read to him about some of the famous people who had a hard time with school.

I am actually updating and posting about it now. I wasn’t going to because I really didn’t want to blog about it but you’ve been such a huge help that I wanted to let people know what’s going on and to thank you!

To answer your questions though, there aren’t other teachers. I think the result would be the same if I requested a different one and since we’re rural another school wouldn’t be the easiest thing to do. I am however considering homeschooling the 2nd grade if they insist on holding him back.

What are your options Nichole? Are there any other teachers or schools? What happened at the meeting?

Right now I don’t really know the reasoning other than it’s to help get “new ideas” on what we can do and to see what we’re doing at home. We are already putting in about 45 minutes EVERY NIGHT which is over the 30 they asked me to commit to. We do sight words (unless they are in the books we’re reading), spelling, and reading every night.

I spoke to the principal this morning and it sounds like there will be more intervention in class (when is he supposed to learn the other stuff?) and more that they will want us to do at home. I was told that the special ed consultant, the school counselor, teacher, principal and one of the guided reading instructors (or maybe the dean of students, they have the same last name) would be a part of this. It sounds like an ambush to me – as if we aren’t doing anything/enough at home but I was told that it was only to discover new ways to help him, come up with new ideas and again find out what we are doing at home (I was also told to ignore the title of “special ed consultant” she’s merely there to offer ideas).

I had a brief talk with him this morning and kind of gave him options as to why he doesn’t like to read (he did tell me he didn’t like it) and his responses was that it is too tricky and it is to boring. He likes funny books or books on world war II (that was interesting to learn LOL) so we are focusing on the funny right now. We have not done any of the repetition reading (I think that’s where it gets boring for him).

This is turning into a chore for both of us and I made it known that I don’t like that my son cried in the middle of a spelling test and to me it sounds like they are pressuring my son and I won’t put up with that.

One other thing he said to me which broke my heart and makes me feel like he is hearing this A LOT from his teacher(s) is, “I’m a slow worker” (???) he was very sad when he said it to me this morning and I told him that there are a lot of very famous and smart people who were told that they were slow or that they weren’t smart and they did amazing things when they grew up. This perked him up but I’m sad that I had to say it to him. I just don’t know what else to do.