Morgan is Four and a Half

[tiger_spot]

Four and a half! It is a different age than four, and a very different age than three and a half

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[tiger_spot]

We are trying to get her into the dual-immersion program, so if all goes well we figure learning how to do everything en Español will keep her busy. The other possible school does some ability-tracking regrouping of the kids between subjects -- in some ways it is not so much three separate kindergarten classes as a very large class with three rooms and three teachers. And she certainly has a lot of fluency to work on. My first day in first grade, they handed out these readers. I sat down, read through it, and went to hand it back at the end of the day to get the next one. The teacher asked me some comprehension/memory questions, which I did not do well on, and she handed me the reader back to go through more slowly and work on more thorough understanding rather than just zooming through. After that I remember being bored when waiting for other kids to get through their paragraphs of reading out loud in turns, but that would have been true regardless of my ability level. The nice thing about reading is that so much of it is independent practice it's fairly easy to individualize.

I'm more worried about the math, personally. Math review can be deadly dull when the rest of the class is having a hard time grasping something you already fluently understand. My dad taught me simple algebra around second or third grade, so algebra class in middle school was an exercise in mutual frustration where everyone else in the class was all "this is so haaarrrd" and I was all "I don't even understand how to explain this, it is so obvious. How can you not get it?"