Kat is in kindergarten this year. Two separate kindergartens to be precise. In the mornings she goes to a lovely Montessori school. They meet her where she is at, they allow her to be a 5 year old girl with 5 year old feelings, they genuinely love my daughter.
In the afternoons she goes to public school kindergarten. They teach her things she mastered over two years ago, they teach her to toe the line, and they let her play outside at recess.
Kat started complaining after the first week of school that her public school teacher is like a preschool teacher and that she knows the material already. We encouraged her to write a letter to her teacher to tell her what she wanted to do at school the next day. The letter was met with a reprimand, "We do not chase people at school." (The letter was about playing tag at recess.) We encouraged Kat to read to her teacher, to wait until the other children were busy and the teacher was at her desk alone and offer to read her a book. Kat says she approached her teacher and said, "I can read." The teacher replied, "Okay." and that was the end of the conversation.
Her public school teacher does not seem interested in what Kat knows. We realize that this teacher has 24 other students to get up to grade level and our play by the rules girl is very easy to overlook.
So today we meet with the teacher. We decided to take it slowly, to just go and feel the teacher out a bit. To ask what she's done in the past with students like our daughter and to maybe show this teacher some of the work our daughter has done in the past. This is uncharted territory for Peter and I, we've never had to advocate for her before and it is kind of scary!
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