I'm late to the party but wanted to chime in. My dd was very very good in writing when she was 4. She wrote a lot. I could see her pain with the school curriculum but felt helpless to do anything for her. She even wrote letter to her principal in 4th grade talking about how GT isn't language arts, it's other stuff, and she needs more advanced language arts. She needed help with character development in 2nd grade. The other kids were still working on writing sentences to express an idea. She begged for help.
Oh the begging for help. It's heartbreaking. In Grade 3 my child's teacher used overt hyperbole in instructing the children on how to write their report on the class camp. "It must have AT LEAST a paragraph about each section, each paragraph must be AT LEAST a page long..." (maybe it wasn't hyperbole, maybe he was expecting many less words per page?)... My child took this quite literally, and (I think) as permission to write how they truly wanted to. The teacher then proceeded to harass the child and I because the work wasn't done fast enough and he wanted to mark it now now now. I often wonder what he thought when he received a clearly thought out accurately recounted 5000 word essay about gr3 camp? I suspect he was mostly annoyed because I don't recall there ever being much feedback other than "completed"...
She got advanced math, and by 5th grade, was advanced 4 years in math, but only one year in language arts. What finally helped-- though there were wasted years that I'm sure took their tool-- was signing her up for online literature courses where she was introduced to real literature and literary analysis. I wish I had found that avenue before.
Could you provide a link to courses you were happy with? I am just about to embark on finding some options like this.
She did that after school through middle school, went to high school and sadly got totally turned off by a teacher who was very encouraging but then got post partum depression and suddenly hated dds work.
What a horrible situation, you must have been very upset for her.
So, at that point, dd found her social needs better met in STEM and pursued that in college. She gave up on high school English meeting any needs at all. The thing is that English is a standard class that everyone needs for 4 years and our state sets the curriculum. There may be different versions, but it's all the same books. YAWN. Math has more options.
It seems very much the case that is is much easier to extend Math and much more common do so. It's possible that may work for my child at some point but not at this point.
I am reading my way through Miraca Gross's book at the moment and she explicitly references that there were children in her study who ended up in STEM not because it was their personal strength, but because they COULD (also) do math/science at a very high level and that's where they were able to get extension and support opportunities.
