March

Daniel is in love. He was so happy to be restarting school, with the chance to see her again, that he was downstairs and dressed before anyone else. Matthijs says that his class (group 4) thinks being in love is stupid, but Daniel is not swayed. He tells everyone - because when you are in love you are so happy that you want everyone to know. He has not made a date with her, though he does say that she is also in love with him. He makes and carefully packs little presents for her and shyly hands them over… it is quite frighteningly cute.

Daniel really likes girls. When Matthijs asked if a computer-game they were playing should have a boy-voice or a girl-voice Daniel chose girl: their voices are nicer and they are really lovely he says. Puberty should be interesting with these two.

Falco’s eating-habits are changing: his favorite sandwich was always chocolate-paste and coconut bread but since we got the bread machine he has become addicted to plain slices of fresh bread. Given we tend to cook low fat we are starting to wonder if we need to add cod-liver oil to his diet (brrrr) to keep it balanced.

He is getting a bit grumpy and unbiddable at playschool, which is not like him. He is also a bit contrary at home but fortunately with number 3 you do have some experience to work with. We had precisely the same problem with Matthijs at that age: he was ready to move on to school. I hope he is not going to do an extended grouch because the summer holiday does not start until the 22nd of July this year.

Daniel utterly loves the Wallace and Grommet film “Curse of the Were-Rabbit” and solemnly told me that he knew why it was called a were-rabbit. When I cautiously asked the reason he explained: “It is really big and fast”. In response to my blank look he added: “So people keep asking WHERE the rabbit is”, collapse of stout party.

This month we also got their school reports. Matthijs’ (group 4) was a confusing mix of “satisfactory/very satisfactory/good” scores and numeric scores, including is scores in the standardized national CITO test. I find these reports give you little ability to draw conclusions: it not clear what, or even who, is being evaluated and how good, good actually is.

For reading he had an "8+" (of max. 10 points) for reading at the AVI 5 level, which amazed us, and the school Reading Mother, as he reads much higher level books at home. According to the teacher the score is for reading aloud and Matthijs tends to trail off into silence as he gets interested in what he is reading, which also happens to me sometimes when I am reading an interesting bedtime story. Given they are only expected to be at AVI 4 level he got the 8+ as it was evident he could read above that level. All in all the reports seem to be kind of a waste of time and an illusion of measurement.

Daniel is still in Group 2 and so does not get a report yet, but he has had a CITO test. He got C in one test and D in another. The teacher said that this was because he daydreamed and did not answer, but there is no doubt that he can do the work, if he actually gets down to it. The teacher is not very convinced of the worth of theses early tests and so we crossed-checked with other parents to get an idea of what the CITOs entail. The quality of the tests is pretty poor: many of the questions are unclear or ambivalent. In one example the teacher would say “strike/hit” (translated from the Dutch “raken”) and four pictures, one of which was a ball bouncing off a wall and another (the “right” answer) showed a bowling ball knocking over all the pins. Both looked correct to us, and apparently many of the children made that mistake too.

Given that this is a nation-wide standardized test, which is used a basis for educational statistics of all kinds the quality is unacceptably poor.