DD8 started 4th grade and is in a sort of gifted magnet in a public school district. They gave all the kids a written pre-test and had DD skip 4th, 5th, and 6th grade math and she is now in pre-algebra. She knows (because I taught her) how to do long division, long multiplication, including with decimals, but by no means has practiced this a lot or is fluent. We're talking maybe 20 practice problems of long division. 4th, 5th and 6th grade math is where these concepts are practiced over and over and she is basically skipping it altogether. She has ADHD and has poor fluency in terms of math in general so this is something she would struggle with if forced to do it. In a way, the best thing for her is to just learn how to do it conceptually and then move on, which is what she is doing. But I am a bit concerned about the fact that she is not fluent at all. As she is exposed to higher level math is it really necessary...after all there are calculators to do the computations. To what extent does she need to be fast or fluent in order to do well in higher level math, like algebra? I can continue working on it at home but I'm wondering how much is really necessary. I was not expecting them to have her skip 3 years of math.
