The first week of June, Raine had a week-long camp with her new first-grade teacher. After the first day, Mrs Gwinner told me what a great reader Raine is. I just nodded, thinking “Yeah, she knows how to read.” But not fully comprehending it . . . until I went over to the front office on the final day of her camp and picked up Raine’s Stanford Achievement Test scores. Then I realized how good she really is! She scored in the 99%-ile in the nation on the reading section. Her grade level equivalent is 3.5. Apparently she’s a little advanced for her age!

I laughed looking back at the school year, remembering how I used to ask DJ, “why aren’t the books they’re sending home getting any harder? She can read them without even trying.” I guess the books were grade-level appropriate, it was just our little reader who wasn’t! But without anyone to compare her to, we had no idea that kindergartners don’t normally read Magic Tree House chapter books.

Seeing her reading score also reminded me of all the comments I got about her not crawling when she was a baby. “She is going to struggle with reading because she didn’t crawl” they told me. “She won’t be a good speller.” “Crawling develops the neck muscles and [blah, blah, blah] she will struggle in school.” I didn’t buy into it then and now I’m VERY glad that I didn’t. I could have done a lot of worrying . . . for nothing!

The score that didn’t surprise me . . . listening! Apparently I’m not the only one she doesn’t listen to!!

I also picked up her final report card:

All I can think is, “thank heaven we started her a year early!” She loved school this year and would have been bored out of her mind if she would have waited until she was 5 to start.