Reply to Parents of 5th graders

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I can't say what the status of other fifth graders are, but I disagree with PP who say that the loss of that 2nd grade year is immaterial. (I agree with those who say everyone was gone March-end of their first grade year).
I am a FP who had a then-4th grader and a middle schooler at home doing online learning that year, and then my next foster kid was in 2nd grade at the time, and the previous FP chose not to send them back to school in Feb. when schools reopened at lower capacity. We changed that immediately.
The middle schooler was bright and read for pleasure, but still, online class was not engaging her and she was not submitting work (her bio mom obviously was not able to support).
The second placement, at end of second grade, could not read vowel sounds correctly and could not read any consonant blends, and could not add 1 to a number with accuracy... you can imagine the uphill climb in 3rd grade!!
The 3rd grade teacher at her Title 1 school is probably one of the best teachers I have ever encountered. The math progress that year was astounding. 
I don't think these kids will ever fully recover academically.[/quote]

I believe this especially because kids who were in 1st grade when Covid hit likely experienced a huge amount of learning loss from what they'd been working on in 1st. It is very easy for me to believe that a kid who had been a beginning reader right when Covid happened would essentially lose most of their literacy knowledge when they switched to online school -- likely the end of 1st was a total loss because March-May of 2020 was a lot of people trying to get computers set up in their homes and teachers learning the software for the first time. For many kids, learning basically stopped on the day Covid closed schools.

Kids in older grades could more easily get back on track via online learning in fall 2020, as they had more experience with learning and were more likely to be able to adapt. But for a 1st grader who basically lost a lot of their 1st grade literacy, and had only 6.5 months of elementary education under their belt, I could see them just never getting back up to speed.

I think kids who had parents at home who had the resources/capacity to work closely with them 1:1 could overcome that, but that's really not most families. My family was able to do that but only because I was able to go PT for the Covid year and because DH and I were both working remotely. Pretending that was the norm instead of a privileged situation for us would be ridiculous.[/quote]

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