Tuesday was Raine’s first day at her new school. She was very excited. Especially after we met her teacher on Monday and she found out that every student gets their own iPad.

So far Raine has been loving Mrs. Dean’s class. There are 20 kids in her class, including her. There are a number of kids from her Primary class at church in the first grade, and one of them is in her class. Our neighbor, Riley, is also in her grade. Raine comes home every day and tells me about the new friends she made.

Mrs. Dean asked me if I knew what reading level Raine was at, I didn’t because Temple doesn’t use reading levels so Mrs. Dean said that she would test Raine to see where she was. Not wanting to be one of “those parents,” I didn’t say anything about Raine’s reading abilities except that she really liked to read. Tuesday evening I received the following email:

“Raine is a fantastic reader! She read extremely well for me today. We use DRA2- a reading assessment tool- to pinpoint a student’s text level. Raine read a level 28 for me and then wrote a summary and answered some reflection questions. For students who read above a level 24, the writing piece is key to advancing. End of year 1st grade level is a level 18, so Raine is clearly reading above grade level.”

I looked up the reading levels and found out that level 28 is what 2nd graders are expected to be at by the end of the year. I’m not sure how exactly the levels work, but whatever Raine is doing is obviously working! They start reading groups next week and Raine is going to be with the librarian for Book Club rather than with one of the 1st grade teachers. Hopefully it will be a good challenge for her. Although, I would rather see her spend more time on math. She doesn’t pick up on that like she does reading and spelling, and I’m sure there are things that this school has covered that she hadn’t covered at Temple. But we’ll see how things go. So far she is loving it!