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Originally posted by viet_mom
Wow. I did not think these kinds of tests were administered so early. This is Vietbabe's first year in school (her "preschool" was just a daycare and she wasn't there full time anyway and so would have missed any "academic" portions). I have to say that overall, my kid seem sooooooooooooooo young. She is in clothes for an 18 month old, has all her baby teeth, weighs about 25 pounds and is shorter than all the pre-schoolers. She still carries her blankey around, uses a pacifier at night (yes, I know - bad mommy) and takes 2 hour naps on the weekends (she would during the week, but it's not allowed at school). Her schoolmates come over and I see them playing "baby" (with my kid in the cradle). Is it possible she just isn't "mature" enough for academics? She's a mid Sept. b'day (she just turned 5 this past Sept - the same month she started school) but it's possible she is actually an October b'day b/c in her adoption paperwork I can't account for where she spent the month before she was received at the orphanage at the end of October.
I try my best not to keep her a baby but to be honest, I feel like I don't have that "intuitive" thing that other parents seem to have as far as raising their kids and I worry that I'm just SCREWING UP ROYALLY AS A PARENT. I do notice that she IS maturing from year to year (able to do more things, understand more, control herself and all).
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Yes, the tests get earlier every year.
It is VERY possible that she's not yet mature enough - this is the interesting piece in that book I suggested. I'm going to oversimplify, but as kids mature, somewhere in the 4 to 7 time frame (different kids mature differently), specific combinations of brain activity develop so that different parts of the brain build a relationship that combines different skills needed for understanding words and numbers. Interestingly, the patterns are different based on different languages.
Part of it is watching verbal skills as compared to written skills - the verbal comes first, and if you have a kid with great verbal skills who is struggling with learning to read, it's often an indication of dyslexia, but it can just be a need for some more maturity. Somebody with real skill (or a good MRI and cutting edge training) can figure out which is happening. If you catch issues in kindergarten, instead of in 2nd or 3rd grade, where they are usually caught, you get massively more and better results from intervention. On the other hand, if the verbal skills are still developing, it's more likely a maturity thing. We knew our first kid had some learning issues when she was orally capable of making up and reciting complex poetry (for a kid) but couldn't write her own name.
Sorry to prattle on so much. This stuff is a huge part of our lives. I'm a bit of a missionary on it.
