This post is just between me and the few people who visit here so don’t be surprised if I move it over to “private” and thus take it down after it’s been up a couple of days.
Got H.o.p.’s standardized scores back. He did basically what I expected him to do.
He’s good with concepts. He’s in the mastered range for reading comprehension, vocabulary, language expression and word analysis, but is the pits in spelling and language mechanics. No surprises there as we’re coping with dyslexia and there are certain things for which he’s just not ready. What I’ve been primarily concerned about with him is nurturing an appreciation for the written word and story.
And he is in the so-called mastered range for all math concepts, but is well…partially mastered in math computation, which does surprise me. I thought the results for math computation would be the pits. Most of the grade equivalents were somewhere in the 5th grade level, though I was very surprised it was at 6th grade level with math concepts. Many of the math concepts he was even better at when he was seven, had them flat down, but got little practice with them when he was eight because all the curriculum resources put so much weight in computation and he hates computation. I’ve got to find something that will interest him in continuing to work at least with concepts.
He scored very high in thinking skills. As his mom, this comes as a surprise to me considering that often enough I wonder where he’s left his brain. Except I know where it is, firmly implanted in thinking about film, film, film, storyboards and animation. Today he was asking me about an animation site and I couldn’t begin to remember the films he was describing. But then I realized, ah, he was describing all the films at an animation awards site we used to visit three years ago, which altered its format so the kid friendly stuff was very difficult to access so we stopped visiting. He remembers all that, no problem. Probably remembers every single frame.
Here’s what surprised me. He got a 12th grade equivalence for science. Now, I’m not surprised in that it’s a subject he loves, the only subject he loves (in fact) outside all the art and film we do. We’ve got a lot of resources for him around here and if he’s not doing film and animation he’s going to be listening to science DVDs and doing science at Brainpop and Cosmeo. But the science part of the test was just not that hard, so I don’t have a clue how this is supposed to give a 12th grade equivalence. That’s part of the surprise to me. Maybe everybody gets a 12th grade equivalence for science. Well, I guess not since he was 99th in the National Percentile. My dad’s a scientist so he may be pleased to hear that.
Anyway.
One–This year I’ve got to find something concerning math concepts that he finds fun, because everything I’ve seen so far for hands-on math and tried with him, he’s hated. And it needs not to cost an arm and a leg. “Living math” has always sounded good but every time I try to get him interested in “living math” he runs. He hates puzzles, he hates games (except for Monopoly, which he invariably wins) and he just plain hates having to figure out anything that he’s not itching to figure out for himself.
Two–We already go to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History a lot. And we’ve got Brainpop and Cosmeo. But we need something else, and it isn’t going to be in the science curriculums I’ve got sitting on the shelves. And yeah there are all the home experiments you can do but his interest in most of those is so-so. And he doesn’t like dead things. And he doesn’t like engineering. You know why he likes science? Because he’s already got a science fiction brain. He likes science for the possibles less than the knowns, only he doesn’t know that yet. The only reason he’s interested in learning knowns is for how he can form a science fiction story universe around them, with a lot of fantasy thrown in, and outright denying the knowns when they get in the way of his preferreds. He likes, of course, quantum physics.
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