Last week, the Monster’s folder appeared from school with a form to be filled out regarding a book report.

As part of Common Core, the curriculum is changing to include a weekly book report of a sort, testing his ability to identify various things in a book.

On the face of it, I think this is a wonderful thing – anything that works on getting the Monster to develop his narrative ability is a good thing, and in fact hews nicely to some of his IEP goals for this school year.  So if he has a weekly reading assignment to do over the weekend, he’ll have all kinds of reinforcement to what he’s doing at school, leaving smaller gaps to keep him moving forward…

In practice, it’s not so great.

Since I’m home today, I did the assignment with him in the kitchen.  The questions sent home are, I suppose, alright when they’re going towards the goals for Common Core – he can demonstrate that he knows what the title of the book is, where the front and back are.  He did most of the reading himself, using the illustrations to help himself through words he doesn’t know…

But he still can’t answer, without prompting, questions about the book.  He can’t tell me, or won’t tell me, about the content without my giving him prompts to help him through the questions, to give him a clue of what I’m seeking.

Now, I know that it’s a process, getting him to the point of being able to answer questions, but the primary issue is still the fact that we’re in the midst of his evaluations, and I’m almost certain at this point that they’re going to tell me he can do things that he’s not demonstrating at home.  I don’t want to have the school setting him up to fail in that way.

I think it’s time I write a note to the teacher and SLP and ask how they’re going about doing the same activity at school, to see if I can’t replicate it at home for the next book report…