Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy no grade skip due to immaturity or gifted traits

Hello,

DD6 is currently in kinder; she was born on Xmas so she is one of the older ones. Whilst she was not a fluent early reader per se (early letters sounds when she was 2), she recently has taken off like a rocket in her reading over the last few months. She just finished Road Dahl's 'The BFG" yesterday after taking a break a month ago and because I wanted to check if she was comprehending as well as reading it, I gave her a few online quizzes and she scored 9 out of 10 questions. She is doing 2nd grade level math and can do simple multiplication and division but is no math whizz. She is HG+.

Her current school has been wonderful and responsive. They have immediately put her into a 2nd grade reading group and have put her in the afternoon portion of 1st grade after she finished Kinder. Academically she is doing fine; actually, she is still telling me everything is easy, but she has improved on much needed spelling and writing skills.

I am trying to get my thoughts and notes down for our meeting with her new school for next year. She will be attending a GATE/high achieving magnet school for 1st. Problem is that of course the school, whilst the principal is very open and eager to work with us to do pull outs for reading, math, is very anti-grade skip.

Feedback I received from her current kinder and 1st grade teacher is that they are recommending she start in 1st next year due to immaturity. I believe this is due to her impulse control such as speaking out, not being afraid to be different, getting momentarily distracted, still not having close friendships with her classmates in 1st and 2nd grade classrooms. Our DD loves older kids and younger kids but she has a hard time making deep connections here. She is bossy and very sensitive and will tell people if they are breaking the rules. She loves talking to adults and older kids, and so I thought she would make new friends in her new classes but I don't think they have anything in common due to the age difference. Instead of conversing with the girls, she would rather run around chasing the boys. This does seem like a maturity thing with me too, or is it simply that she has no intellectual compatible peers here?

Have your children been branded immature by your school when they are just showing traits of giftedness? I don't know which is which at this point. I do feel that she is very unlike the typical well behaving 2nd grader..she is so full of energy and intensity. But, she does not have behavior problems at school.

I know the principal will bring up the maturity issue when we meet (he knows the 1st grader teacher very well) and I want to be able to counter some of his concerns. I don't think we can pull off the grade skip, and I'm at a loss as to what we cab do for the next school year. Whilst she will be doing more in-depth work, I know she will be doing a lot of work she already knows.
Also, if she grade skips to 2nd grade, I feel she still will need pull outs in math and ELA by middle of the year, so perhaps keeping her in 1st is the best thing?
TIA for your thoughts.

I'm not sure from your post what the teachers mean by "immaturity?" Did they give you examples? Maybe they have some valid concerns?

I wonder is her behavior better in K, or in groups with 1st or 2nd graders?

I see no issue with her running around with the boys-- I don't see that as immature, maybe she'd prefer to do that than the things the girls are doing?

I know I only posted questions and not answers, but I hope that thinking about those may help.

Thank you for your input howdy. I believe the behavior is similar in K and 1st. Not sure about 2nd but I think she is okay in there; I have not talk to the 2nd grade teacher. I'm not sure if appropriate work will help settle some of these behaviors but I have a feeling not. She is an intense little girl.
Good to hear your thoughts regarding the running around with the boys thing. I was under the impression that gifted kids usually crave intellectual connections and conversations. I think she tries with the girls but no one really responds to her. I sometimes see age peer girls staring and gaping at her with their mouths open when she is talking and they do not respond back. They don't like playing with her as much as the other girls. She doesn't use terribly advanced vocabulary with them so I don't understand why they think she is different. But again I am only seeing the interactions on the playground after I pick her up. She tends to either talk to adults/ much older kids and plays with little kids.

What does it mean that it is a "GATE/high achieving magnet school," practically speaking?

It sounds like the new school views itself as a lid.

Thanks MON! This is very VERY much like my DD. She is also very intense and she tends to explode at home if she doesn't get the work "right" the first time, or if she is not allowed to figure it out the way she sees fit. She is very self-directed. But loves the challenge and will ultimately insist on doing work that isn't "easy".
Fortunately she is also organized and efficient for the most part, unlike my space cadet DS.
This has been such a learning process for me. Am I right in thinking that she will have these type of issues whether she is in 1st or 2nd grade next year? I think as she gets older, she will be able to harness some her intensities somewhat but she will always have a low tolerance for frustration, etc.

It is a magnet school housed in a regular K-5th school. They are housing it there due to low local enrollment; area is full of "good performing" schools, but this is one is the outliner in the district. The program is very popular since it started 3 years ago and it is difficult to get in in the upper grades.

Practically speaking though, it is not an gifted only classroom. The criteria to get in are teacher recs, test scores or reading/writing skills for kinders, and results from the nonverbal abilites test. I'm not sure how many true peers she will have here. Judging from my experience with volunteering in DS classrooms, it is full of bright kids. I can't tell who are bright versus gifted since I don't really work with kids very much and I am mostly out of the classroom copying and grading.

They start in 1st grade. My DS moved from our local school to this school for 3rd grade. For him, it's been a great match. They move through the curriculum faster and go deeper into subjects, using m3 math and great books as extra curriculum. It is not however, an accelerated program, which is why we met with the principal to discuss whether this school would be a good fit for my DD. He told us that generally it isn't accelerated and they are going to work with DD to do pull outs for her.

Problem is she whilst she likes the pull outs, she hates missing out on stuff in her regular classroom.

Like howdy, I wouldn't be surprised if the reason she's running around with the boys is that she enjoys what they are doing more than she enjoys hanging out with the girls in her class. My ds had a best friend (female) in early elementary who simply wasn't into the types of things that the girls in the class enjoyed. My ds is EG, and I have no idea what the intellectual ability level of his friend was, but from what I saw their friendship was based largely on personality type - they were both quiet observers who liked dinosaurs and Harry Potter and making forts in the snow etc, not kids who played with dolls and enjoyed Hannah Montana or whatever girl cartoon was wildly popular back then.


It's true - highly gifted children do often crave intellectual connections and conversations, but I wouldn't discount that they also crave connections in other ways too - personality, friendship, fun etc. And I wouldn't assume that the other girls don't like playing with your daughter - I'm guessing it's more a situation of not having found a common ground, for whatever reason. My older dd is really really social (and with ease), so she's always had a ton of friends at school. It's been interesting to see, as the school years go by, how so many typical girl friendships and relationships change and morph (sometimes very quickly). It's possible that's part of where your dd isn't really fitting in with the girls.

It sounds like your ds has had a really good experience at the new school - so I'd at least seriously consider giving it a try, even if you feel your dd will ultimately need more challenge. If this is your first meeting with the principal, it's good to go in with a thoughtful plan in terms of what you feel your dd needs, but also go in with an open mind ready to listen to what the principal has to say. No one meeting is ever the end of the journey - I suspect you'll come away from the meeting not satisfied 100%, but with a lot more data and understanding of where the principal stands. Then, after the meeting, put together your response and updated requests, and send that in writing.

One thing I think you'll need to figure out - and I'm guessing you won't be able to get to it with just this one meeting (although maybe you already have a good understanding of it since your ds is at the school?)... is *why* the resistance to grade skipping at this school. It could be as simple as a school district policy that the principal doesn't want to have to disagree with or advocate for an exception to. It could be that there is a policy in place in the district that allows grade skips and the principal doesn't want his staff to be bothered with the time and paperwork required to do the skip. It could be that the school has tried grade skips in the past and they didn't work (for any number of reasons). It could be that the principal philosophically doesn't believe in grade skips. Or it could be that the school has a philosophy/mission/value set that is firmly entrenched in "going deeper" vs skipping up or a belief that all students should be working at the same place as their same-age peers etc. At the meeting, ask about the possibilities of a grade skip, and if the principal tells you the school doesn't grade skip, ask why.

I also think that there are a lot of different meanings being tossed around when people use the word "maturity" (which you can see just from the replies to this post). If the principal brings up maturity as a reason not to skip, ask for specifics re what he/she means by "maturity" and ask for specific examples from your dd's school experience that illustrate what is being referred to as immaturity.

Good luck with your meeting!

polarbear

Is she chasing after the boys literally? My son needs to expend extra energy at recess. Maybe she's not into stationary play and just needs to run around to settle down later.

I would ask the 2nd grade teacher about how she fares with the reading group there. One of the hardest transitions from K to 1st for my kids was the abrupt lack of play time. When my son went to the first grade classroom to meet his teacher he asked her where all the toys were. Not there, that's for sure!

Maybe you could find a way to bridge the gap and keep the higher grade reading.

If your now school promoted her to 2nd grade and skipped her for next year, would the magnet school take her as a 2nd grader then?

I ask the skipping part since we are in sort of that position right now. Our current school will promote our dd to 9th grade (just turned 13) for next year. We just have to let them know yes or no by the end of the year. We are trying very, very hard to move to a better district over the summer somehow and they may not want her skipped. If they do skip her, we could probably make a case for undoing it if we moved. If for some horrible reason we have to stay at this school, we'd have to keep the skip to keep her challenged. The academics difference between the two schools is very stark

She also doesn't want to skip because she's highly attached to her friends, which she would be leaving anyway.