STAR EXAMS, AUGUST 2015

We think Cora's reading assessment is spot-on. She is improving each week with us at home and, by our estimation, will be a fluent reader (of age appropriate books) by Christmas (if not sooner). It's been very different this time around with her than it was with James last year in Kindergarten - they are different kids and learn in different way, and with him as an example (and her natural abilities), she is moving along very quickly. We're really proud of her and grateful that she enjoys reading (and school in general) so much - it makes it easier on us parents, for sure!

Between math and reading, math would be where James excels. He likes to read and is very good at it (it's amazing how quickly he's grown as a reader over the past month), but math definitely comes easier for him. The only time I notice him struggling with math homework is if I find a wrong answer and have to correct him - he gets mad at me and tells me I'm wrong! He blurts the answers out so quickly that sometimes he skims though, because he thinks it's easy and therefore doesn't need to pay too close attention (for example, he added 4 and 4 to equal 4 yesterday, and when I corrected him, he literally slapped his forehead and said "Of course I know that, I just didn't see it right!"), but it's pretty rare for him to get a math question wrong (whether at school or on homework). I foresee he and Jay working the complicated stuff out among themselves someday, as math is not my strong suit. Jay went much further in his math training in college than I did and gets it a lot faster than I do. I may be a scientist, but I rely on my software programs to do most of my data analyses! Oh well, James likes to tease me about needing my toes to add 7 + 7 because I don't have enough fingers/thumbs... little stinker. Anyway, I wish this exam report had given us a little more to go on than "James' math skills are greater than 70% of students nationally in the same grade." That's great and all, but Cora's assessment gave us a lot more details to work with! Their recommendation to have us work with him adding and subtracting "numbers in the ones" "with sums to 10" seems pretty boring, considering he's been doing that and more for the past year...

I'm not sure how I feel about this exam report... We probably need to meet with his teacher to get an explanation of how we should interpret the acronyms and scores, but just a quick internet search tells me that his IRL score of PP means that he can read Pre-Primer words/books easily (rather than Primer or higher books), and that his ZPD score of 1.2-2.2 means that his IRL score is similar to that of other kids in grades 1.2-2.2 (so, approximately his current grade level/month of school up to the understanding of an early second grader) and that he should be reading books graded at 1.2-2.2 to promote optimal learning. At least, I think I'm interpreting that correctly... Another internet search tells me that Pre-Primer books correlate with late-kindergarten through mid-first grade, the excerpts for which seem to match most of what he reads at school and at home, which tells me that James is right where he needs to be. However, the description for Primer books (which correlate with the third quarter of first grade) also describe books that James currently reads (at home, at least), so he must be straddling the line of PP and P (even if his test scores don't exactly show it - as I explained the other day, he did need some practice with the AR computer testing system before he figured out how to complete it properly, and they didn't have any practice for their computerized STAR exams, taken in week two of school). I have no idea how to compare these results to the standardized test he took last March in Kindergarten,so again, I should probably ask Ms. Currie for a meeting just to clarify everything. And to ask her what "word attack skills" mean and how we should help James master them. Regardless of the specifics though, I assume he's doing just fine, since his first three AR books have been at the 1.5-1.6 level and he reads those with ease (which doesn't surprise us, since he tested out at level 1.7 last March in Kindergarten).