Sorry about the long title. We're in the process of going through a lengthy testing with dd#2. I'll update on that as we continue to get in results, but as of the two IQ tests she's taken thus far (one last year and one recently), we have reason believe that she is at least HG. She is having a really horrible school year in 3rd for a variety of reasons and not performing much above average in school, however.

Some of these issues will go away next year in that she will have a different teacher. One that won't however is a bad mismatch with the math curriculum. The district she is in uses everyday math which just doesn't work for dd. At this point, she thinks that she is bad at math and she hates it. I am actually pretty sure that math is one of her stronger suits if it is taught to her in a different way.

The main issue seems to be that they introduce multiple ways to do something all at once and expect the children to learn them all before getting one down. For instance, they learned lattice method, partial products, and traditional multiplication all at once as soon as they were introduced to multi-digit multiplication. The traditional method was shown like once and then dropped while the other two were expected to be mastered together. The traditional method is the one that makes the most sense to dd, but she is marked wrong if she uses it b/c she isn't using the method they are asking for. It is too much info all at once and not the way she learns.

I know what the 4th grade curriculum looks like b/c dd#1 was in that grade last year and it is not going to work any better for dd#2. It's mostly a repeat of 3rd grade material.

We have two school options next year:

1) keep her where she is with a better fit of a teacher, but the same curriculum issues
2) send her to a nearby school in our home district that doesn't use EM.

The pros of #1:
* known teacher for 4th whom we like and have a good relationship with
* continuity
The negatives of #2:
* the EM curriculum
* despite an IQ in the HG+ range she won't get a GT label or qualify for GT services b/c her achievement scores have sunk like a rock this year and she needs a math achievement score in the 98th+ percentile to be subject accelerated and a reading achievement score in the 95th+ percentile to go to the TAG reading class next year. This is going to be really tough on her self image b/c she already feels stupid and it will make her feel badly that she doesn't qualify for things her sister did. She's a pretty competitive kid.

The pros of #2:
* they don't use EM
* she would track with the kids from this school to middle school
* same school breaks as her sister, who is in this district for middle school
The negatives of #2:
* this would be her fourth elementary
* in talking with parents whose kids go there, they feel the following:
- the principal can't admit when she's made a hiring mistake, so poor teachers don't leave
- the school, while IB PYP, isn't as academically challenging as our neighborhood school (which we didn't find challenging at all and is less challenging than the school dd#2 attends now). I worry about her making little academic progress, which is already a concern.

I'm trying to come up with other options as well. If these were your two choices, do you know what you'd pick, though?