Her first-grade teacher said at the last meeting with family and students before summer started two years ago that in all her years' teaching, she had never had a class who across the board was doing so well. This is a good thing for my daughter because she wants to keep pace with her peers. But it also put pressure on her because standardized tests are just pressure-inducing things.
She was given an accommodation of extra time because it takes her longer to read than sighted children—something I think is going to be less of an issue as she does significantly more reading this year. Watching her fingers fly over the braille seems quick, but when she reads aloud you can tell she's not moving at the same pace word-wise that a sighted child would be who's in fourth grade.
An envelope came home with her on the first day of school with the results from the EOG's. We went over it with my daughter because I thought it would be good for her self-image to know how well she did. There is a writeup for parents with the test scores stating basically that with the pandemic, education wasn't at the level it normally would have been and to take that into account when looking at your child's scores.
With that in mind, I expected my daughter to do fairly well, but I wasn't going to be worried if she wasn't where she likely would have been if she had been in school with her braillist converting all her materials to braille and her VI teacher delivering in-person lessons including tactile materials to go with the concepts.
Ohly she did well. She did very well. Scores range from level one to level five. The first two levels indicate that you're behind and not on grade level. Level three and four are considered On Grade Level with levels four and five are listed as, "On track for career and college readiness." My daughter is being prepared for college even in third grade it would seem.
How did she do? For reading, the school, district, and state average in Level 3, with her school barely missing Level 4. My daughter was well into Level 5 with the comment, "Your student's score is higher than 95% of third-grade students in the state." So wow, yeah, she killed it.
Math was similar. She's in advanced math classes this year even though she thinks she's bad at math. The school, district, and state again were in Level 3, but much lower down and surprisingly, her school was much lower than the state or district. My daughter made it to Level 5 just barely with the comment, "Your student's score is higher than 87% of third-grade students in the state."
When we told my daughter we said it was important not to talk about the scores with her classmates. We weren't sure if we should be sharing them but we wanted her to know she did well (since she worried about it excessively last year) but it would be sad if she told other children and they didn't do as well. How would that make her feel if someone said to you they got better scores than you did. She understood. I'm glad we decided to tell her the results. It was nice seeing the smile of accomplishment on her face.
The Big Boy Update: My mother called today to say my son was on the iPad. She tried so hard to keep him occupied so he wouldn't want to do screens. I told her that was quite the accomplishment. He is on screens here. He is managing his time appropriately so we're letting him have more time this summer than we will when school starts next week.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter is really into the hoverboard these days. There is nothing holding her up. She's standing on a moving platform with wheels. She could topple over in the street and hurt herself at any moment. But I have to let her live her life. So I just watch and hope all will be fine. Bandaids on standby.
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