Your Eight Year Old by Louise Bates Ames

Author:Louise Bates Ames [Bates Ames, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80896-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-13T16:00:00+00:00

EVERY CHILD IN THE RIGHT GRADE

Let’s say your Eight-year-old boy or girl is not doing well in the third grade. Perhaps somebody has even labelled him or her as learning disabled. Some children, though many fewer than are so categorized, may indeed be learning disabled. There are many reasons for school failure.

But the chief reason we have observed, the one we have observed most often, is simple overplacement. Many perfectly bright little boys and girls, who have no serious intellectual or perceptual problems, who have supportive homes, who really do try their very best, fail in school simply because they started too soon, whatever their chronological age, and thus are in a grade for which they are not ready.

All too many parents and administrators assume that just because a child is five years of age, he or she is behaving like a full Five and thus is ready for kindergarten. However, individual differences in growth rate abound, and many perfectly bright and normal children are not Five in their behavior, despite their chronological age. And thus they should wait an extra year to begin school.

Our own recommendation, and a policy that is now in actual practice in hundreds of schools around the country, is that all children start school, and be subsequently promoted, on the basis of their behavior age, not their age in years. Certain tests (among them our own) can be given to all school beginners (and to older children when any question about their grade placement comes up) to determine whether they are ready to start school or, when the time comes, to be promoted.

We list here signs and signals, developed by a teaching principal, that a child might be overplaced, or unready. Any parent or teacher can check these signs. (It is, of course, important to keep in mind that all children display some of these signs at times, and that some signs and signals transcend grade levels. That is, they could occur at any age.)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.