Last night, we attended conferences for first grade at The Little Kid’s school. It was overwhelming to hear about the expectations for first graders. For example, they’re expected to write a paragraph containing a main idea, three pieces of fact about the main topic, and some type of closing sentence showing their feeling about the topic.
We got to see an example of this. I saw where TLK was attempting to put the paragraph together and was thinking it through, but didn’t know a lot of the words’ spelling. I asked, “Is she expected to know all of these words?”. I mean, there is a lot of red ink here in the form of spelling corrections. “No, only the words we’ve learned so far, but we’re beginning to look things up in the dictionary, too.”
Overall, the scores were good. She does love math, which makes me wonder if she was perhaps switched at the hospital. 🙂 She got an “E” for “exceeds expectations” where her penmanship was concerned. “She is careful and does it right, consistantly.”
We have a few things to work on… reading faster (they actually TIME words read per minute) and paying attention during science. It’s funny, though. When I ask her things at home, she knows them, but at school, sometimes she doesn’t. I’ll have to talk to her about that.
When I was in first grade, they were starting to teach us letters and simple words, like A is for apple. Writing a paragraph was out of the question. I don’t know why kids are being pressured to learn this stuff so early.
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In first grade, I jumped schools mid-semester. It was pretty traumatic, as none of the new kids seemed to like me too much. First grade isn’t something I’d want to do over again, that’s for sure!
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