Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy End-of-school-year-itis

In theory, we have multiple options. State law says:


IMHO, DD really needs someone to teach her new material. I think she would find it really isolating to be doing different work, and that she would struggle to do it without structured adult support. We've used EPGY, ALEKS, and IXL, and for each of them, she's needed a live person to explain new concepts; the pre-set explanation didn't work for her. (She disenjoys the Khan Academy videos, too.)


I think I'll suggest stopping IXL at 80 percent complete rather than 100%, which will cut down on the repetition signficantly. She needs some practice to fine-tune her understanding, but you're right, the repetition is counter-productive after a certain point.


We usually practice spelling words together, and I read her "I want to be homeschooled" as "I want to spend more time with mom." Too-easy spelling words means that either we don't practice as much, or there's no reason for me to teach her etymology and memory tricks to help her remember spellings. It's not clear to me why some of her homeschool plan selling points are "You wouldn't have to drive me to school," and "You could just leave me work to do." I suspect bait-and-switch.

Isolating to do different work is an issue, if it's really an issue, IYSWIM. DS has not minded at all, fwiw. They work at tables, they're on different pages of their book anyway, he's using a different book, doesn't really matter. He does say that there's some system of a child chosen at random being called on to answer a question and sometimes because he's been doing his own work he hasn't heard the question and then his teacher lets him off answering it, so I suppose there must be some plenary that he's missing out on in that sense. You might ask Alex how she'd feel if she were sort-of home schooled for maths but did her maths "schoolwork" in the classroom at school - she might surprise you.

Needing a live person: well, actually learning new stuff from a book at school is hard and TBH I haven't so far expected DS to do it, and we've never seriously used canned explanations (DS likes to watch the Alcumus videows but it's for fun really.) Although - now that I try to explain how DS does learn new stuff I find it hard to explain. Chemistry he certainly learns from books these days, at home, because we don't know what he needs to learn. Maths? Most cases recently that I can think of have this pattern: I give him an assessment test of some kind at home, he can't answer a question, I explain how to do it and say "ah, so you need to do this chapter"; it's 2-3 pages of text and we look at it together on the bus some time; then he does the chapter-end questions (3-5 of them) at school. Maybe he refers back to the chapter if he didn't get something, I dunno. At the least, he has seen the material before and had a chance to ask questions about it. Probably now it would work for him to learn stuff without support at school, but it wouldn't have worked at the beginning of the year, and I suspect the chemistry experience has helped. I think the main thing I'd say from this long witter is that there just is a surprisingly small amount of new material at this level. I bet if you could sit down with Alex for half an hour twice a week, and teach her stuff she was ready to learn at her pace, that would be more than enough, i.e., she'd continue to learn more than 1 year of stuff per year. (This is one of the reasons why I insist that problem solving is so important - how fast these children would go if going fast through the curriculum were the objective just doesn't bear thinking about!)

However, at least half DS's maths time at school he's doing problems that aren't aiming to teach new material but to give him practice in problem-solving. That's really what I think Alex would benefit from. There's lots of material for this; three UK examples in increasing order of difficulty are:
Challenge your pupils
Junior and intermediate challenges
problems from the UK JMO


Ah, so she's valuing time when you're helping her learn above time when she's supposed to be learning things in school - sensible girl on many levels :-)

Otherwise known as theory of mind ;-)

ould homeschooling her next year be so impossible or such a disaster that it isn't worth even considering? Would the elderly grandparents be willing to supervise? How does the system work - could you try it for a term and put her back in school the next term if it didn't work out? It clearly wouldn't matter if she learned nothing for one term, provided that happened in a way which somehow made her likely to learn something in the next term, e.g. in the worst case through a renewed commitment to school...

Academically and practically, I don't think it would be disastrous or impossible at all.

MIL is having some health issues, so I'd want Alex to come to work with me. She could have her own space in my (gigantic and easily reorganized) office, complete with her own desk and computer. I personally would prefer if we had a shifted calendar, with my busy time her official "vacation," but if we keep the office workload similar to this past year, she wouldn't need to stay home even then. We just wouldn't do much planned learning.

Our state has strong homeschool protections, and no reporting / curriculum requirements. OTOH, it has no "part time public school" program that would allow us to do PE / music / art through the public school - you're either in or you're out.

Socially, I think it would be disastrous. She needs a lot more non-family social interaction than I do, so I'd need to suck it up and find her a social group. The local homeschool community tends to be very religious - of the 9 groups Google finds me, 3 require a signed statement of faith (which we couldn't truthfully sign), 5 others are explicitly Christian, and the last is a Yahoo group of unknown persuasion. DD is currently very anti-religion - her second-best friend is out of favor, because "she worships God, which I do not do!" (ETA: There's a national secular homeschooling message board, with 6 members in my state. The only active member is a practicing Catholic using religious curricula. Around here, "Christian" is code for "evangelical Protestant," so it doesn't surprise me to find a Catholic aligning more with the secular crowd - but it doesn't help me much in looking for a truly secular group!)

The school has to take her, whenever we choose to re-enroll her, so there'd be no problem giving it a trial run.

I anticipate significant parental dissent from the mama end, particularly for the type of unstructured plan I'd anticipate would work best for the personality combination we have.

Yeah, that also explains the over-the-top "That was a very interesting piece of information, Mom" I get in response to virtually every explanation. It totally works, though - praise the behavior you want, and you get more of it.

It makes it very hard for me to tell what she's really going for, though, because she'll reinforce a behavior that has both desirable and undesirable components, and it's not always clear to me which component she desires (or that one is undesirable).

She had an excellent day at school today, and said she even worked diligently (but unsuccessfully) at her timed subtraction worksheet. Which could be random chance, or a better-for-mood-control lunch, or that her best friend came back from vacation, or that she doesn't really disenjoy school after all, or that I didn't flatly deny her homeschool request so she sees light at the end of the tunnel. So hard to tell.

Update: I dug into the "boys are annoying" today, and finally got out of her that it was one particular boy, who had recently been moved next to her in music because he was causing too much trouble in his original seat. "He says disgusting things," said DD. What sort of things? "Too disgusting for me to say." She finally agreed to write down the least disgusting thing.

Apparently this little boy has been saying "donkey b*tt" and "donkey p*n*s" to her. Which, yeah, is pretty disgusting when it's being done by someone you have no ability to move away from.

So I'll be talking to the music teacher on Monday to make sure he's not sitting by her for the rest of the year. And requesting that she not be placed in the same classroom as he is for the coming school year. And I think asking her current teacher to not put in her table group between now and the end of the year. (They have new tablemates every two weeks.)

That same mama just came to me out of the blue, and said that she thought maybe an additional subject acceleration would be a good idea.

So we have until July 15th to decide for sure, and until July 28th or so to make sure she can pass the test. 4th grade math is an easy test to assess readiness for, because sample test questions are published.

She's doing the CTD / GLL grammar class over the summer, so we could go that route, but I anticipate that repetitive math will be harder on her than repetitive grammar.

Good - it's always nice not to have options ruled out.