Not even talking about gifted kids here. I've always wondered about the "shapes" stuff. Like, how many kids really don't know what a circle is, even disadvantaged ones?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130516105108.htm

If you read "Transforming the Difficult Child" then you saw that they recommended setting the bar very low when training a child, so they almost have to succeed. They call it "setting them up for success", iow, setting them up to listen to you. The story they told was of training Shamu to jump out of the water the laid the rope on the ground and gave him a fish whenever he swam over it. They just kept raising the rope higher.

And thus we come to understand the difference between training and teaching.

It seems to me that they could just give the kids some assessments, see how they do, and move ahead. This is the issue with slavishly following a curriculum. Blah blah GAPS, I guess....but you could review periodically...

Even my 9yo still reveals a lack of clarity on place value sometimes. I don't think the schools do a good job with it. Meanwhile, freaking shape ID still comes up.

We experienced that, too. My eldest's second-grade Everyday Mathematics book spent time on shape identification. The kids even had to cut out triangles and paste them onto a sheet of paper.

DD just laughs openly about it. I can't blame her.

You are advocating tracking (perhaps more fairly described as ability or readiness grouping) starting in kindergarten. In our school system, like many others, tracking only starts in 7th grade in math and 9th grade (high school) in all academic subjects. When I was in school there was ability grouping in math and reading in elementary school, so ability grouping starts later than it used to.

I support your proposal, but elementary school teachers and administrators want to keep age-mates in the same classes studying the same things, with the pixie dust of "differentiated instruction" solving the problem posed by heterogenous grouping.

If I read that article right, the fall of K being studied was fall 1998, so indeed, it'll be interesting to see how things have changed.

I've talked before about the surprise I felt the first time I found that DS-then-just-turned-3 could indeed answer "which number is less?" questions not, as I'd expected, for all pairs of the numbers he apparently understood, but only for some of them, just as the developmental list I'd been reading predicted (albeit for kids several years older!). So it could be that teachers observed "teaching counting" were actually doing something much more sophisticated and appropriate... no, who am I kidding?

But seriously, part of it may be a mismatch between what mathematically aware people intend and what actually happens in the classroom. For example, identifying shapes is a grand thing to do if the follow-up question is "How do you know?". Children may start school being able to identify circles, but they don't, typically, start school knowing the definition of a circle. I would think there is lots of good maths to be learned by a Socratic dialogue along the lines of "What is it?"... "How do you know? Could you explain what a circle is to a Martian who doesn't know the word circle?"... "So is this a circle, too?"... "Why not?"... "Ah, now I understand. So this is one, and this isn't?" etc.

How is this supposed to work? I can guarantee my son will NOT listen if you're repeating stuff he's known for years over and over and over! lol They should just give them some more challenge to actually keep them interested! And perhaps have the teacher's aid work with those who truly have some gaps on catching up ... yeah, I know that won't happen because those behind would keep falling further behind but oh how numbingly boring is it for those kids who already know all that stuff?

Actually--no, I wasn't, though I'm not opposed to grouping for math and reading in K. But what I meant was that they should test the whole class early on, and if they ALL know what a dang circle is, maybe they don't need to spend 13 days teaching them about circles.