Dateline June 28:

“Could a star shine any brighter than Jon this year?” Okay, I may be a lifelong professional brown-noser and mark grubber, but I was left in the dust when Jon came home with that particular opening statement in his report card.

Shortly before the end of the Jon’s “third-grade” year, he finished his Grade 1 reading curriculum, straight from the book without magnification or CCTV enhancement. Or put another way here’s his progression over eight months:

From this, to this (same scale)

Jon’s spelling, typed on the computer, started out at 10 words with weekly tests, but after he finished 300 Dolch words (meaning the first three grade levels), his teacher sweetened the pot. At first she went further into the Dolce list, but Jon could call his test at any time. His test was upgraded to typing ten sentences, each featuring a test word. Jon immediately started to use novel or challenging words in the sentence along with the test word, and any of those that were misspelled were add to future lists. Jon started to call his tests every 3 or 4 days. His tests have always been 100%.

Jon has been doing his creative writing often since January. Tami intended him to dictate his sentences to her, she’d write them out and then he’d transcibe, but he immediately took to typing it from his head, and shortly thereafter refusing to tell her what he was about to type until it was onscreen. This meant that his creative writing compositions also became a source of new spelling words.

Math is still a sticking point. Jon seems to think that it’s a code related to spelling, somehow (which is of course a code he’s cracked). A very neat thought process, and I can’t help to think sometimes that he’s just overthinking it. We will keep working on math, but while reading is hot, we will obviously keep stoking that fire.

Clearly Jon and his teacher Tami are on an amazing hot streak, and we are so happy that Tami has decided to keep with Jon and his class for another year. She has big plans for Jon again in the next school year, and I can’t even imagine what they are. We are so lucky Jon has a teacher and support team like this, who can come up with creative ways around any obstacles he comes across, but also adjust to let him fly if he shows signs of exceeding expectations. What a bunch!

I think it goes without saying the we are incredibly proud, but in many ways it feels more like it’s all we can do to keep out of his way simply support him as he puts all of his efforts into this work.