Blown Away

I need to brag about this girl today.

Last school year, sometime, we realized while she wasn’t behind she was getting close to being there. We enlisted the help of David’s former teacher mother to give her some extra help. As this school year has begun it’s becoming a little more obvious to me that she’s behind. Now, what I don’t know is if it is a real challenge she is having, i.e. learning disability, or if it’s just the fact that she’s a daydreaming 7 year old. I’ve been working hard to get her as much extra help as she needs and setting things in motion should further testing be needed. And so now we kind of wait and see what kind of progress she makes with this set up.

All the grades, except kindergarten, participate in a reading program called AR. Each of the students checks out books at the library at their own reading level, reads the book, then take a short computerized quiz to test for comprehension. While the students are given time throughout the day that they can go and take an AR test it really is up to them to go and do it. The teacher sets goals for each student to reach so many AR points before a certain time period. Then if they’ve met their goal by the end of the quarter there’s a party (or in this quarter’s case a carnival). Half way through the quarter MT was behind on her goal. I didn’t know if this was because she wasn’t taking the tests because she wasn’t reading her AR books or if she didn’t feel like she was given enough time. David, MT and I had a discussion about  her “job” as a student and the fact that she needed to be bringing her AR books home (she kept leaving them at school) so she could read them at home then be ready to take the test. She started to put forth more effort and I could see she was really trying. But knowing how far she was behind at the halfway point and how close we were to the end of the quarter I had some doubts about her being able to finish the goal by the end of the quarter.

She told me yesterday that she needed to take four more tests, by Friday, in order to meet the goal. Doing the math in my head I knew she would have to take more than one test in a day and I just wasn’t sure that it was possible.

Someday I’ll learn not to doubt so much.

She gets in the car today and the first things she said was, “I took 4 tests today! I got my goal! And William did too! We both get to go to the carnival!”

I was blown away. I know the teacher has been pushing the kids hard to meet their goals this week but still I was so very proud of this girl.

Is she still behind? Yes. Does she still need extra help? Absolutely.

But I’m still so very proud of her progress.