6 Year Old Checkup & EOG Scores

So I finally took Rebecca for a (belated) 6 year old well checkup, after somehow completely forgetting to do so when she actually turned 6 at the end of September. She is 45.5 inches tall and 46.2 pounds, which puts her at the 50th percentile for both height and weight. Her height seems to be dropping off.

The checkup went fine until I asked the doctor if we could do a celiac screen on both Rebecca and Ben (who was along for the ride) because Caroline's GI doctor had recommended having the other kids tested and I had not done that because, well, my kids hate needles and also the thought of having ANOTHER kid with celiac disease, especially one who's old enough to remember what, say, an Oreo tastes like, was just too difficult for me to contemplate six months ago. But Abby gave me a bit of a lecture the other day about how I needed to do it, so out came the needles and my kids FREAKED! It took myself + two nurses to hold Becca down, and Ben was not much better. In fact Ben was traumatized not only by the blood test, but afterwards spent an hour freaking out about the possibility that he could have celiac disease, though I tried to reassure him that it was just to make sure that he didn't, and that I really didn't think he did. I don't know when the test results will be back, because in the chaos of the ordeal I forgot to ask. But I'll be sure to update here when they come in!

In other news Ben got his results from last year's End of Grade exams. North Carolina switched last year to what's known as the "common core" standardized test curriculum , which has been adopted now or is in the process of being adopted by 45 states, basically so that test scores across states and against other countries can be compared accurately because everyone's taking basically the same test. Unfortunately for NC , and as other states have found as well, the common core tests are a lot harder than the tests that they replaced. In NC only 42% of 3rd through 8th graders were deemed proficient in math , and 44% in reading on last year's test. This compared to 83% and 71% the previous year on the old test.

Of course at Ben's school it was more like almost 90% of students were rated proficient in both reading and math last year (still a drop from previous years which were >95% usually). Ben himself got a "3" (proficient) in math and a "4" (superior) in reading. So, yay Ben! As a reward for the "4" in reading, we got him the Lego Marvel Superheroes video game.