Making the Grade

Well, we had the meeting with Gamble's teacher, the first grade teacher, the principal, and his reading tester.

We all agreed that it was in his best interest for Gamble to be eased into First Grade. Later this week, he will go to the First Grade classroom from 8:30 to 11:30 for reading. It's a pretty intense program, as it's three hours of uninterrupted study time, with no breaks.

In the near term, he'll get a break and come home for lunch with Mommie, instead of eating lunch and going to recess. At 12:30, he'll go back to school and be with his friends from p.m. Kindergarten.

Because p.m. First Grade is where they do all the math, science, art, and music, we all agreed that getting him in as soon as he's ready is the best for him, especially since Math is his favorite.

(an aside: since Random was at day care today, he ran in to wake up Nicole and begged, and I mean begged, for a math lesson. So today Nicole started to teach him Roman numerals. We now have a cute little activity sheet with all sorts of math problems done in Roman numerals. She additionally worked with him on negative numbers, first drawing the whole numbers along a number line and then extending it backward to the negative integers. I believe sky's the limit there. I'm pretty good with Algebra myself, so maybe I'll see if he can tell me what "x" is).

The next step will be to get him to be there the whole day, so it will be a.m. 1st, lunch and recess, then p.m. kindergarten. Then, when he's ready, we'll just bump him up. Based on his scores and abilities, the teachers aren't worried about him being behind.

In fact, the principal said that there was no way he would be able to keep a child like Gamble in Kindergarten.

Another thing I thought was interesting about the combination was that the reading tester talked about how well he assesses a work when he's reading. She talked about him knowing strategies for reading, being able to sequence a story, etc. Apparently, reading goes from about level 3 to level 20 in 1st grade, and Gamble was tested along the entire spectrum. They discovered he was about level 14, so he'll fit right into the 1st grade classroom.

We told Gamble tonight, and he was just about as happy as can be. He's pretty excited about it, and Nicole said she saw relief in his eyes. I talked to him just a few minutes ago, after he was all tucked into bed. He said he was really happy, and after I told him how proud I was of him, he beamed, almost like I've never seen him beam before. I told him that his new class will be challenging, and that he had our support, and we're there to help him if he needs us. "Daddie, I need a challenge," was all he said.

We did some quick projection. His birthday is in the summer. In the summer before his senior year of high school, he'll turn 16. He'll be a 16 year-old senior. We've now set him down the road I grew up on. From experience, I know that can be a hard road. I hope he handles it better than I did, but I now understand better why I had to walk that road, too. When you have a child like Gamble (who's far cooler than I could have been at that age, by the way), you have to let them grow to the best of their abilities. I have seen how much he dislikes the pace of his current classroom, and how much he dislikes school as a result. Worse, I remember the feeling of being frustrated in the classroom, and I know we couldn't keep him back.

Good luck, little boy. Little man. Little first-grader-to-be.

They grow up even faster than you think.