Parenting Catch-all

Yeah, he (8yo, 3rd grade) enjoyed the sub. His previous standardized tests were all in a high quintile. Last one was in the bottom quintile, indicating not up to grade level.

And his sister and mom both had Covid in January. Maybe that shook him up.

I don't want to excuse lack of effort; I also want to understand root causes.

I talk with the teacher next week.

Have you asked the kiddo what was going on that day? I mean, entirely possible he won't know, won't be able verbalize it if he does, or won't be willing to do so (if he fears punishment or there are negative emotions attached to it), but no harm in asking, right?

Did your son have learning from home time? Our youngest (turned 9 in July last year) had a similar performance drop. Remote learning was leaving her behind and it took my wife and I 30m-60m daily after-work extra lessons with her to catch up. She's back in line with her cohort now so it's nothing more than a sign there may be learning disruption you need to assist them with overcoming.

Bfgp wrote:

Did your son have learning from home time? Our youngest (turned 9 in July last year) had a similar performance drop. Remote learning was leaving her behind and it took my wife and I 30m-60m daily after-work extra lessons with her to catch up. She's back in line with her cohort now so it's nothing more than a sign there may be learning disruption you need to assist them with overcoming.

Conversely, my son did awesome with distance learning (he's in 5th grade and has peer issues, so very situational) and struggled being back in the classroom and having to deal with in person "distractions".
All things to look at.

Bfgp wrote:

Did your son have learning from home time? Our youngest (turned 9 in July last year) had a similar performance drop. Remote learning was leaving her behind and it took my wife and I 30m-60m daily after-work extra lessons with her to catch up. She's back in line with her cohort now so it's nothing more than a sign there may be learning disruption you need to assist them with overcoming.

Online school was Mar 2020 until Jan 2021. He's been back in school full time for a year. Test scores last spring and this fall were his normal range.

He also reports blurriness with his vision so we're getting his eyes checked.

Top_Shelf wrote:
Bfgp wrote:

Did your son have learning from home time? Our youngest (turned 9 in July last year) had a similar performance drop. Remote learning was leaving her behind and it took my wife and I 30m-60m daily after-work extra lessons with her to catch up. She's back in line with her cohort now so it's nothing more than a sign there may be learning disruption you need to assist them with overcoming.

Online school was Mar 2020 until Jan 2021. He's been back in school full time for a year. Test scores last spring and this fall were his normal range.

He also reports blurriness with his vision so we're getting his eyes checked.

That will do it. I remember it took a bit of me complaining about not being able to read the board before I got my first glasses in 4th grade.

I was in 3rd or 4th grade before my mom realized I had vision issues I was trying to hide from everyone. My daughter's 2nd grade teacher caught her squinting and moving closer to see what was written on the board and let us know well before it became an issue for her.

Man, when I was a kid I couldn't wait to get glasses, I thought they were the coolest thing ever for some reason.

I hadn't quite comprehended how complex teaching can be until I took a closer read of the national curriculum and the overall ordering of subjects and subtopics as to how they build a systematic understanding of, for example, basic mathematical operations and order and fractions into algebraic expression of problems, factorisation etc into graphing solutions and geometry.

This came up when my grade 7 boy challenged me as to why the rule of subtracting a negative integer can be expressed as adding it. I had no recollection as to why and how to articulate its practical application until I spent a few hours researching it.

There's some fantastic online resources particularly for maths, including the NSW Government's TIMES project (teaching guides to help teachers teaching maths) and stuff like Khan Academy or Eddie Woo on YouTube.

The remote learning thing, I think, is ok once kids get more independent in their learning (which seems to be around the grade 5 level as teachers work to build the foundations for early high school expectations).

Chairman_Mao wrote:
Top_Shelf wrote:

How do you all handle underachievement in education with your children?

Report cards came home and let's just say there was no way to score lower on the standardized test, as in, might not have even out their name down. Performance on this test is massively lower than past exams.

N=1, BUT.

Am scheduling time with teacher to get more context.

Very interested in those with more experience.

Was this iReady, by chance?

I hate iReady almost as much as ST Math. Okay, no I don't. I hate ST Math way more than iReady. Oh, lets give kids math problems with no explanation of WTF you are supposed to do. It's great because it's equal for people who don't speak english. Everyone will have no idea what they are supposed to do. F*CK YOU. F*CK YOU. F******CK YOU STMATH. God I hate that program.

Bfgp wrote:

I hadn't quite comprehended how complex teaching can be until I took a closer read of the national curriculum and the overall ordering of subjects and subtopics as to how they build a systematic understanding of, for example, basic mathematical operations and order and fractions into algebraic expression of problems, factorisation etc into graphing solutions and geometry.

This came up when my grade 7 boy challenged me as to why the rule of subtracting a negative integer can be expressed as adding it. I had no recollection as to why and how to articulate its practical application until I spent a few hours researching it.

There's some fantastic online resources particularly for maths, including the NSW Government's TIMES project (teaching guides to help teachers teaching maths) and stuff like Khan Academy or Eddie Woo on YouTube.

The remote learning thing, I think, is ok once kids get more independent in their learning (which seems to be around the grade 5 level as teachers work to build the foundations for early high school expectations).

Remote teaching of grades 10-12, for five months of lockdown here in Greece was a f*cking nightmare for all involved. Even at the beginning, when morale was still pretty high, the mechanics and limits of online teaching meant that in a normal lesson, I'd get about 40-60% of the stuff accomplished that I would normally do in a real classroom.
Also, it sucked. Nobody wanted to be on camera, or out of their beds, or presumably off their phones after the first few weeks. For five months.

My kid did remote for all of 1st grade. She was generally good but did need me to keep an eye on her. Some classes just did not work well to do remotely and she came to hate them (gym, art). The teachers for those just couldn't take the time to help out those having an issue one-on-one so they'd get left behind. Others she'd get bored in and towards the end of it she learned to lie about having internet problems to drop out from the meeting.

Remote can work, but it really needs someone at the kids home able to actually watch the kid and keep them on task, and a lot of parents just didn't have that ability. They were either working remotely themselves or were essential employees and not home at all.

Online learning was a difficult time for everyone. I don't think there was any way to prepare for it and it made it difficult for everyone. It also made it easy for people to do the bare minimum (both students and school personnel). It didn't help that, for the most part, everyone tried to replicate in person learning in an online environment with tools that were never made for learning online or, at best, were hastily modified to support a classroom structure. I'm glad my kids are back in school but we are still dealing with the repercussions of how poorly everyone was prepared for online learning.

Remote work, on the other hand, worked great for many people but many businesses (and people) don't want to continue that model. I have been at work for a week and the only time I see anyone else is for meetings. And most of those worked better online anyway.

That is the one and only actual, good *work* part that online teaching produced: all of our meetings are online now. All of them. Because teachers in my program work very different schedules from each other, (and some people have huge commutes through Athens), this has been great.

The other benefit has been that we now have the infrastructure to easily upload files for our students, share announcements electronically, etc.

Actual teaching? Not for me.

Remote learning worked incredibly very well for some probably few students like one of my kids who needed the extra time to mature up before returning to a classroom.

lunchbox12682 wrote:
Top_Shelf wrote:
Bfgp wrote:

Did your son have learning from home time? Our youngest (turned 9 in July last year) had a similar performance drop. Remote learning was leaving her behind and it took my wife and I 30m-60m daily after-work extra lessons with her to catch up. She's back in line with her cohort now so it's nothing more than a sign there may be learning disruption you need to assist them with overcoming.

Online school was Mar 2020 until Jan 2021. He's been back in school full time for a year. Test scores last spring and this fall were his normal range.

He also reports blurriness with his vision so we're getting his eyes checked.

That will do it. I remember it took a bit of me complaining about not being able to read the board before I got my first glasses in 4th grade.

Update:
Eye test was perfect. His vision is just fine. Opthalmologist told him to relax his eyes more instead of straining.

Also, he's just not been applying himself. We've given him some homework pages each day to write complete sentences and work on spelling and penmanship. There has been a definite improvement.

Teacher conferences are this week so I'll be interested to see how his teacher thinks things have improved.

In our last chat with her, she definitely has higher standards for the kids and this is her first year in district. I'm totally good with high standards. Will be watching for his new test scores.

Side topic: thinking about a Disneyland trip, either June after school gets out or maybe in October. Is this the place to ask questions about that (it's very much going to be a kid-focused vacation for our 9 and 5 year olds) or is there a better thread?

Anyone recommend a scooter for 4 year olds? There are a million of them.

How athletic/coordinated/whatever is your child?
Some can handle a small razor pretty early. Others may be best with a 3 wheeled scooter for a while.

Mixolyde wrote:

Anyone recommend a scooter for 4 year olds? There are a million of them.

We went with a Mini Micro (Micro website for our 2 year old. It’s a three wheel but it is lean to steer. Friends of ours’ kids were using theirs until past 5. At least in the U.K. there are loads on Facebook marketplace and they hold some value on resale.

lunchbox12682 wrote:

How athletic/coordinated/whatever is your child?
Some can handle a small razor pretty early. Others may be best with a 3 wheeled scooter for a while.

My kid was on a 3 wheel Little Tikes lean-to-steer scooter until she was 6, when she graduated to a Razer. But she was a touch behind the curve in terms of gross motor skills.

I think she's a little ahead of the curve for skills, but very short and light for her age. Not sure if that makes a difference.

The Micro brand three wheel one is popular in our neighborhood and that is what we got for our three year old. Worked much better than the two wheel we originally tried. She still uses it often and she is almost six. They should have them at Target and other stores around town.

There may be a better thread for this, but anybody got recommendations for a Chromebook or similar ultra-low-budget laptop for a 7-year-old? Primarily for homework. Would be a bonus if it could run Minecraft and/or Roblox decently, but not a bonus worth paying a lot extra for.

Hey we got HP Chromebook 11.6" Laptop PC , Intel Celeron, 4GB RAM, 32GB SSD for our 7 year old about a year ago for around £200. It works well for homework but haven’t tried any games because mini bbks minecraft habitat needs no additional outlet.

bbk1980 wrote:

haven’t tried any games because mini bbks minecraft habitat needs no additional outlet.

That would be my attitude as well, but I'm just doing research on behalf of my nephew's mother and grandmother so that's up to them how much they want to indulge him.

hbi2k wrote:

There may be a better thread for this, but anybody got recommendations for a Chromebook or similar ultra-low-budget laptop for a 7-year-old? Primarily for homework. Would be a bonus if it could run Minecraft and/or Roblox decently, but not a bonus worth paying a lot extra for.

I had these exact requirements. You should know that Minecraft and Roblox don't run on many Chromebooks without a little hacking (either forcing access/installation of Google Play or manually grabbing APKs and using an app to run them) because they aren't compatible with the Google Play Store. Be sure to check on that if you go that route or get comfortable with process of enabling installation of those games.

We went for the cheapest, but still decent enough, Windows Laptop we could afford. For us that was the Lenovo Ideapad. 4GB of Ram is the bottleneck, so you really need to get in a kill off any bloatware, eliminate unnecessary services, etc. if you want it to hum and keep the caches cleaned regularly, but it fit the bill nicely.

Anyone have any experience in getting a kid that's afraid of taking a RAT to actually take one? Because I've got a very sick 4 year old who really needs to take one. I want to make it a normal experience for her, not something we need to fight over, but it's not going well so far. Any tips, anyone? We've got both the saliva and lollipop style ones and she refuses both (not even gonna attempt the nasal swabs).

halfwaywrong wrote:

Anyone have any experience in getting a kid that's afraid of taking a RAT to actually take one? Because I've got a very sick 4 year old who really needs to take one. I want to make it a normal experience for her, not something we need to fight over, but it's not going well so far. Any tips, anyone? We've got both the saliva and lollipop style ones and she refuses both (not even gonna attempt the nasal swabs).

We really struggled. Our youngest has had three between the ages of 3 and 5 and I had to hold their arms in each time it was really heartbreaking to do. Our eldest when they got to 6 became bribable to do it so all it cost me was a couple of minecraft dungeons DLC packs.

I had to lookup what a RAT was. You mean a Covid test right?

Ours did it ok when she was five and we had the nasal swab kind with the qtips, we just treated it like a normal thing that was no big deal and we all did it together. I went first, then mom, then daughter. She wants a a little nervous but it went fine.