DH and I have been summoned to the headmaster :-) Seriously, a secretary rang up and asked us to make an appointment "to discuss DS". Probing got me "well, didn't you know the head of maths had been looking at him?". Nope... Anyway, we have a bit over a week between now and the appointment to work out how to approach the meeting. I am fairly confident that it's going to be a friendly collaborative "how can we all meet his needs?" meeting, not one to slap our wrists for letting him get ahead. I'd appreciate thoughts about what to suggest.

DS is 5y6m old, in his first year of schooling (called P1 here). Areas where he's far ahead are reading (he was an early self-taught reader, and can now read pretty much anything, though he has very low tolerance for scariness and mostly sticks to non-fiction) and more recently maths (he finished ALEKS Mathematics Level 3 today, having started it late March). OTOH, while his writing is coming on nicely, I'd say it's age-typical, not advanced (his motor skills all along, gross and fine, have been ND). He's somewhat emotionally mature for his age, not especially social, but gets on well enough with both age-peers and older children.

He has a really nice teacher, who's handled his advanced reading well, I think, with a good mixture of reading suggested by her and things DS chooses for himself. In maths she is, I think, a bit too focused on speed rather than concepts; I don't mind if they drill him a bit on speed with basic number facts, but one of the things I'd like to ensure is that they'll be prepared to let him work on advanced concepts alongside. He seems to be quite happy with the topic-based format of the P1 classroom, though he's repeatedly complained about maths being boring.

At one time I wondered whether having him skip P2 and go straight on to P3 might be good. However: he's basically happy with the P1 group; he'd struggle with the writing demands of P3; and he would still be ahead in both reading and maths; so I no longer think that would be a good move at this point.

We could ask for him to take maths with a higher year. My reservation on that is that he goes so fast, and need so little consolidation, that I doubt it would help for long; I think he'd soon be bored with the amount of consolidation work the higher class would do. Also, I'm not sure whether he'd cope with the non-mathematical demands that would be made of a suitable class, like speed of writing or prolonged silent work (given that the ALEKS course he just devoured is aimed at US 3rd graders, I think he'd need to be joining a class 3 or more years ahead for him to be learning new stuff, and that's quite a social expectations jump). So that tends to make me think that just setting him his own work in the normal classroom might work better. On the other hand, I do think he'd benefit from some chance to do maths collaboratively with other children, so I'm torn. If they had a recreational maths club he could join, I think that might be ideal, but I don't think they have. (Maybe they could start one? :-) So I dunno: some kind of "visiting rights" arrangement with a higher year, short of joining that class for every maths lesson?

In summary, I'd very much like to hear your thoughts, especially if you've BTDT! Feeling a bit overwhelmed...



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