Saturday, August 25, 2007

Just some thinking this Saturday morning

My mind is so stuck on the 13yo wanting to go to school. I keep thinking about how likely it is that he'll want to go for gr. 9--ONE year to get him ready. I don't know if it's do-able, so I guess I just have to do my best.

I'm going to guess that he hasn't done any reading this summer whatsoever, so, I kind of worked out a plan to work incrementally through the year through different grade levels for his language arts work. Here's the continuation of an idea I had a while back:

Each month will have a specific grade focus. I can't decide whether to start with grade 3--which would be comfortable, except for the writing requiremetns--or grade 4--which could be a bit of a challenge. If I start with grade 3, this would be the sequence:

Sept.--grade 3
Oct.--grade 4
Nov.--grade 5
Dec./Jan.--grade 6
Feb./March--grade 7
April/May--grade 8

Of course, I could modify it a bit and have that as just the writing focus with the reading being a little more challenging.

To be honest, this isn't really any different than what I'd been planning before I found out about this little 'crisis' of his. So why does part of me feel panicked? I think that part of it is that I wasn't worried so much about his actually being able to do the different levels on grade level, but to be exposed and get a good feel for the type of requirements, even if he was being incredibly supported to complete it. I guess part of it is that I felt that if he had the next two years with me, there was a chance he could go back to school without any type of accommodations or whatever (he was previously assessed as LD with the public school board), but if he goes back in year, I just don't know. It all depends on his academic abilities.

Is it reasonable to expect a child to catch up that much in a year? It's hard to say. How many cases have I heard of homeschooled or free schooled boys his age who hadn't read before and decided to read and were reading at grade level within a year? I've seen him in the past gain a year in his reading within a few months. I think that with the work I'm going to have him do, I can add at least 2 years to his reading level for this coming year. But I don't know that I can do much more than that if *he's* not going to put forth the effort. If he were to read just an extra 30 minutes a day throughout the school year, I'm sure he would easily add another year or 2 to those gains. I'm serious. This is a kid who, once he really puts in some effort, he learns well. Yes, he had things in the way in his early years (part of it was that he just was not ready to be in school), and he does have little quirks that block, but I've seen what him doing just a bit of extra reading can do. Geez, with barely any reading, his reading level still goes up dramatically!

I'm starting to babble. I'll go do something else now.

No comments: