Melissa and phonics

Well, tomorrow Melissa has a live online session with her teacher to evaluate her to see if she needs to go back into phonics and lang. arts K instead of staying in grade 1 level. Scott thought is was silly to consider putting her back, so today I did her unit 1 assessment for phonics. She should have done the unit 2 assessment on Friday, if that tells you how much she's struggling. Anyway, he was listening to us while I did her assessment, and when he realized that she can't do the work he was livid. Not at me or her, but at our local school district. They passed her to 1st grade even though she didn't pass the K reading assessment, they told me to work with her every day through the summer. Well, watching her literally in tears today over the first sentence she had to read to me in her assessment made him so mad, I've never seen him this mad about something before. He literally wanted to go find her teacher and hit that woman, but its not the teacher's fault. Her teacher worked with her every day on her reading in school, I worked with her daily also, she just isn't getting it. Reading just isn't clicking for Melissa at all, she can painfully sound out a word like "cab" (that's actually the word that got her to tears today, she just hit her limit right there with it) and knows some sight words but she's not ready for more complicated reading beyond that.

So tomorrow at 1pm she gets a live session with her teacher, the teacher already told me that its not a sign of failure on our part if she has to go back a level, and its not a problem if she goes slower than written through K phonics for a while as long as she is making progress. Her teacher agrees with me that Melissa needs tested for learning challenges, but can't say what to test for or when they can do it until after a couple live sessions and seeing a good bit of Melissa's work. We are just being patient on this one for now, and will see what happens.

But Scott and I are both in agreement on one thing. If OHVA gives us a hard time about Melissa's reading progress (especially after this year is up if she's not done with K phonics) then we're going to be pulling her from their program and work independently with her until her reading is up to grade level. Lydia may or may not stay in OHVA if that happens, we'll decide later based on how she does with this year's work and how we feel about the program overall after the school year is up. I'm not going to let a group of people who don't work with my girls daily tell us that they aren't doing well enough in their lessons somewhere, if this happens we'll be independent homeschoolers in a flash. I will NOT be bullied by a public school district again, not after the year Melissa had in public K last year.