07.07.08
Nerves
I don’t know why, but my stomach is in a knot waiting for T’s test tomorrow. I’m really, really glad that they give the results right then. I’ve read about some of the tests you have to wait a couple of *weeks* for the results, I think I might go crazy by then. I vacillate between thinking “Of course they’re going to be blown away by him, he’s really smart” to “This is all in my head and if I just don’t do the test I get to pretend a little while longer”. And I know in the grand scheme of things this doesn’t matter at all. He’s T. He’s going to be T when he wakes up tomorrow before the test and he’ll be T still when the test is over. But this is something of a moment of truth for me, either he’s what I’ve been saying he is or he isn’t. I’ll post tomorrow when we get home. My prediction, just to have it in black and white because I’m curious how accurate I am at gauging him: Word decoding ability 6th grade, comprehension 5th grade, math high 3rd grade, general knowledge 4th grade. If I come back tomorrow and he’s only at the 2nd grade (which is still perfectly respectable for a 6 year old, lol) promise not to give me too hard of a time 
07.05.08
“no!”
since when is “no” a legitimate answer? At what stage did my eager to please child turn into this robot whose automated response alternates between “no” and “I dont want to”?. it seems like everything I say gets a wise ass retort, anything I ask for I get a refusal. you little twerp – I ask to be polite, refusing me is not an option. I have now stopped asking, so as not to have the “no” as a possible response (and what a mental change that was, from being polite and asking to ordering about – although, truth be told, I kind of dig the power of ordering as oppsed to begging my child to do something). We now talk in orders and commands. get this, bring that, do this. is it working – not really, although I do enjoy being able to say “I didnt ask you to, I told you to” and “if you are rude once more you will be punished”.
I informed her today that the only time a refusal response will be allowed from her is in answer to the question “would you like X?”. as of tomorrow I will be carrying around a notebook and for every refusal a mark will be made. 3 marks – no tv, another 3 – no computer. anything more then that – no books, just sitting with arms crossed on the bed. I must be the only mother in the world who needs to resort to “no books” as a punishment. it goes against anything and everything I believe in, but desperate times etc.
Advice? Ideas? this attitude is new, but I want to nip it in the bud ASAP. I DO NOT plan on raising a 7 y/o with a teenagers attitude, and I am sick and tired of feeling like Miss Hannigen (from Annie, if you didnt get the referance) with the ordering about, and even sicker about this feeling of wanting to shake and harm my child.
07.03.08
And then there are days like this….
There are many days when Savanna seems like just an ordinary 6 year old and I wonder if maybe I am just pushing too much on her thinking that she is gifted. But then she has a nuclear melt down over a miniscule paper cut and I am left straddling this huge fence that I can’t get down from. Part of me wants to get her tested, but part of me is just enjoying life and what she brings. I don’t know if “KNOWING” for certain would change anything in our day to day lives.
But on days like today I find myself slipping off that fence ever so slightly. She has been bugging me for the last week to start homeschooling her again. Seriously? What 6 year old wants to learn and do homework and projects? I am NOT prepared to homeschool her just now, being away from home, without all my supplies and generally feeling out of sorts with my location. So I bought her a grade 1 math book, just because it was all they had at the store and I thought it would be something to keep her busy. According to her grade 1 teacher, math was not her strongest subject so I figured a little practice might be good. She has whizzed through the first dozen pages or so with one or two wrong in total. Today I noticed that it started covering a subject she didn’t do in school (grouping/counting in units of tens and ones.) She read the directions at the top of the page, and within 20 minutes had taught herself the whole unit and gone through all 5 pages. I quizzed her, and asked her questions afterwards to see if she understood what she was doing, and she totally gets it. Again…what kind of 6 year old teaches herself math concepts??? So now I am left scrambling again.
Life is never dull and I don’t know really what to do from here.
07.02.08
Testing- update
Ok, I know I just posted about this, but we decided to go ahead and spend the money to have an achievement test done. It’s $65 (way cheaper than a full scale IQ test) and will give me information that’s relevant to our situation, like what level he’s working at in reading and math. After posting about it and thinking more, I decided that since this will be concrete information (as opposed to a theoretical number) it wouldn’t be nearly as anxiety-provoking as the thought of the IQ test. I *know* for a fact that he’s above grade level, so there’s nothing to worry about, the only question is how far above? Well, if he’s working on a 2nd-3rd grade level that’s fantastic, because that’s the materials I’m planning on working with him this year. If he’s working further ahead, that’s fine too because I’ve been planning on letting him move through this stuff as quickly as he wants to, without forcing him to demonstrate absolute mastery before we move on and I’ll just know an objective source is telling me that it’s ok to move really quickly.
Anyways, the test will be next Monday at 10:30am. I’ve got a call into the tester because I need to make sure she understands that he’s working ahead of most other rising 1st graders, otherwise I’m afraid he’ll burn out about 10 minutes into the test, lol.
07.01.08
Testing
Have you guys thought about having your kids tested? I have so many mixed feelings about it and so we haven’t done it. On the one hand it would be nice to have a number to reference for the things he can do, on the other hand what if that number isn’t high enough to explain his behavioral quirks and it just leaves me with a child who is going to need a bunch of other labels to explain it. And what if I really am just an over-bearing mother and am out of touch with the reality of what he’s capable of? What if that number is lower than I think and it just proves that his school was right?
I think really though, what scares me is that based on the things he can do that I *don’t* teach him and his behavior issues (which apparently are pretty good indicators of high level giftedness), I’m afraid of how high that number is. What if everything we’ve done for him so far is so woefully lacking? What if he’s going to need college before he hits puberty? What if based on that number I stop parenting him and helping him in the ways that I sense to be best and start looking to “experts” to tell me what to do with him?
I’m so torn and the curiosity is *killing* me, but I need to know that if we go into a testing situation I’m prepared for whatever the outcome and right now I can’t say that.
….and I accuse T of over-thinking things, lol.
06.29.08
last day of first grade tomorrow
and all I want to do is sing is my own version of “I will survive” – “I have survived (barely)”.
the biggest problem with 1st grade, while it was wonderful for her socially, is that we realized how different she is from other kids. her grasping, her understanding, her proding and poking a subject until you want to tear your hair out, her comprehension of life in general. And while I love her with all my heart and then some, wow – it must be so much easier raising a stupid child….or at least a child that you dont feel is being screwed over/ignored/neglected by the education system.
Summer time – here we come!!!!! At least for these two months I can relax and srop worrying that I’m not doing enough for her. *huge big sigh*
06.27.08
Lexile Scoring
I don’t know if you guys had seen this or not, but it looks like a good way to screen/suggest books for the kids. You can search their reading level by inputting a couple of their books and then based on that level query age-appropriate suggestions.
http://www.lexile.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?view=ed&tabindex=5&tabid=67&tabpageid=313
06.26.08
schooling
Maybe this doesn’t really need to be here, but I am SO frustrated right now. We put Savanna into public school in January so that I could take a temp job. Before she went in I had just started addition and subtraction to 18, and we were working on sentence structure. She could identify nouns, pronouns, and adjectives and we were about to start getting more in depth with that.
Well she doesn’t seem to have done much more then that. I know they did a bit with money (coin value and such). But in Language Arts they were working on constructing proper sentences (capitals and punctuation), and not working on what goes into a sentence. What a waste of 6 months. When I talked to the teacher before we put her into school I asked where the class was, and she said that when Savanna joined them they would be starting addition and subtraction up to 10 and moving on from there. I figured that would be okay, because it is always good to get extra practice in. I didn’t know “moving on from there” meant that the end goal for the year was math facts up to 18.
She wants to be homeschooled for Grade 2, and has told me so from the beginning. I was hoping to buy the grade 2 curriculum and start in the middle of July, and just use the next couple of weeks for review and some down time. I was going through my grade 1 book, and she is NOWHERE near ready to start the grade 2 book. They didn’t do units of 10’s (that I know of), they didn’t do double digit math, they didn’t do a whole bunch of stuff that we would have covered if I had continued to homeschool her.
Now maybe, this book is advanced for a grade 1 Curr. but we have to spend the rest of the summer, and maybe longer, working on it before we even think about touching the grade 2 stuff. So the rational part of me is trying to say that she will still get it all in, and that she will still be advancing at her own pace, and that she is still SO far ahead of the other kids that I don’t have to worry about it. But the irrational OCD side of me is furious at the wasted 6 months, and at the fact that we will be starting “Grade 2″ later then all her piers, and that bugs the gunk out of me.
On a note regarding her, she is such a “law abider” that I am sure she spent a good deal of the last 6 months doing very little, because she wouldn’t dream of acting out while she sat there waiting for the other kids to finish their work. Prefering instead to just color or wait until they moved on. She said herself she liked going to school…gym class, library time, music. “But sitting at my desk for all that time Mom. That is SO boring.”
Observation
Apparently without T here, it’s much easier to be logical and think about how I can better approach raising him (imagine that, not having a screaming match at 7am over breakfast cereal makes me more logical, lol). But this whole Evil IL think got me thinking- is part of the reason he freaks out so bad because he understands things about people and sees parts of situations that others don’t and he doesn’t know how to handle it? Because I *know* what my IL’s are thinking, I can describe to DH his mother’s motivation and see right through her manipulation and it pisses me off to no end. To DH, I look paranoid and delusional, until she slips up and her real motivation is exposed, in which case I’m proven right. It’s happened time and time again with them, it actually happens quite a bit with people in general, too. I forget that not everyone can see the things I can and it makes me crazy to no end to have to justify over and over what seems to me as plain as day. If as an adult it tends to make me look off-kilter and act irrational when I’m told I’m crazy for seeing more to a situation than what’s evident to others, how can a 6 year old handle that?
So, I’m wondering if at least part of our issue isn’t so much that he refuses to take risks in general, as it is that he’s seen that the whole way he understands the world is so radically different than what other’s experience, that unless he *knows* he can translate fluently his inner experience to the outer world, he can’t risk it.
Does that make any sense?
06.25.08
Living in her own world
this is a mish mash of a post, sorry about it!
While I know, without a doubt, that Noam is NOT autistic, there are time when I wonder. When she sees a book, any reading material, her mind shuts off to anything around her. she gets so involved, she is locked in her own little world, and she manages to build a fence (brickwall??) around her that is very hard to penetrate into. For instance – Today was her drama class end of year production. the girls invented their own play, arranged their costumes and it was very sweetly done, very age and skill appropriate. Noam LOVES drama. with a passion. she adores the teacher, loves the class, and has been talking about nothing but this production for weeks now – the whole 6 year old crush sha-bang. for the play she needed a book of spells, so she took one of her magazines with her. and at some point in the play she actually sat on stage – reading. one of the other kids needed to nudge her to get her moving again. she always has a book in her bag with her and I have now threatened that I refuse to have her read in the car while I am taking her from place to place. as is I feel like a taxi driver, a bit of conversation would be nice, especially as at home she disappears to do her own thing the minute she can.
To go back to her “own world” thing – when she is reading she is unreachable, I can call, shout but only when I have escalated into a scream that is literally in her face does she look up and then ask why I was shouting. I even thought her hearing must be impaired, but it isnt, when she choses (I wonder if its a consious choice or not) to be with us, she can hear a pin dropping three doors down. While I am thrilled that she loves books and reading, amazed at her reading and comprehension abilities and stunned by her analitical capabilities, I am also worried about the fact that she seems so much happier in her own world and that her retreat there is so completley, 100% total. this whole paragraph, BTW, can be read with the word ”tv” replacing the word “books” – except that the tv I have more control over and feel perfectly happy denying her “tv time” as opposed to “book time” which I wont.
and to branch off on the reading, I have finally reached the stage where I have no control over what she reads, and for the first time since she started reading well (Novemberish), I actually have stopped glance reading through her books. they are thick 500 page books, in a small print, in Hebrew. and I hate reading in hebrew. the advantage of these thick books is that while the Nancy Drews, Famous Fives etc she gets through in an hour or so (and being us, we didnt really beleive her so we tested her on them – yup, she can read a 200 page book in an hour and answer all questions on it), these thick books take longer to read and we no longer have a panic that we must get to the library NOW, because 6 books a week just arent enough…
and last thing on the reading – she started 1st grade in Sept reading kids books, the ones with pics etc. she could read a book to Tomer. By Oct she progressed to chapter books, Nov it was long chap books without vowel marks (in hebrew the vowels are little dots and dashes that are taken off once the kids start reading properly, around 3rd grade) and now its books of the 9th-10th grade curiculum. and when you see a book on a reccomended reading list, dont assume that the topics are nice and safe. apparently big kids like to read about teen age pregnacies and drugs. that was a fun conversation to hold. NOT! but wow, her progression is just unfathomable, but so so her. KWIM?
