My Little Guinea Pig

Okay, so I'm stumped... I'm not sure what's going on at her school, except that they are testing her -- but what are they testing her for? As in the previous post, we had asked the teacher if she could give Nicole 1st grade work, because the Kindergarten work was not challenging enough. She obliged and the results were fantastic, as previously blogged. So, after I'd made my last blog entry, Nicki says, 'Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, Ms. Turner had me reading all these books to her at her desk.' So, when I asked her what books they were, she recalled the titles of two, which I googled and found out that they are part of a Developmental Reading Assessment... of which Nicki read to level 34, answered questions about the story and then she said that's all the teacher had. That particular book/story is called: "Be Nice to Josephine" and corresponds (in all the charts I found) to a 3rd or 4th Grade level reader. Okay.... but keep in mind, I'm just having to piece everything together from what Nicki's telling me, so I have no idea how to interpret these results.

So, today, when she came home from school, I asked her how her day was and she said that she had to go with a different teacher, Mrs. Bartley, she thought the name was, and do some other reading tests and all. I looked on the school's website and saw that Mrs. Bartley is a 3rd grade teacher at Colinas. So, I'm really confused as to what's going on. She said she had to do 'word stretches'... which I googled to find out is really 'phoneme segmentation', word rhyming, say a word and replace a letter... which I googled as well to find out is really, 'phoneme manipulation', as well as read another book to this teacher. She said she was supposed to do math with another teacher, but he wasn't there, so she didn't.

Jason and I expressed our concern over the Kindergarten curriculum, and asked for some harder work for Nicki so that we could possibly get her interested in school and keep her from getting in trouble. But with these tests, and without communication from the teacher, I'm getting a little nervous. I'm not sure what's going on. I mean, I'm incredibly impressed that the teacher would take it upon herself to go ahead and start the testing process... but what are they testing for?