Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Social Emotion or Academic Challenge?

Hi everyone,

I am wondering how other parents have ranked the social emotional needs of their gifted children relative to academic challenge and a gifted or accelerated curriculum.

We found a school that could address both of our dd's needs and felt so lucky but now they look to not reopen this year.

Upon looking around we have found some nice accelerated and creative options, and also some "college prep" based options. There is also another option that I think would address her emotional well-being and love for asking the bigger questions.

She is 4 so we can't get into public schools or charters around here due to DOB and the process for early admin is really insane.

In your experience how have you made trades and why?

Thanks!

Well, our son's social and emotional health declined when he was ill-challenged and improved when he had his intellectual needs met. So the two went together for him.

Note that appropriate challenge is different for different kids and isn't always about doing more faster. (Though sometimes it is.)

I'm not sure that's helpful, but it's what come to mind for me when I read your post...

For 4yo kids, I tend to be a fan of half-day, play-based preschools and doing projects at home. It depends on the child of course, but I don't think that early admission is necessarily the best option for a lot of kids. It can be hard to have to sit still so much. It's a perfect choice for some, but I wouldn't assume it's the right choice for all HG+ kids. (Not that you are!)

I too would be a strong advocate of play based pre-school. Depending on the LOG, it seems very difficult for a preschool to support the academic needs of a gifted 4 year old - and I would be leary of one that claimed that they could. The *nice* thing about this age is that they can play with their friends at preschool half day, and do whatever else to remain academically challenged at home.

At four, we chose play based preschool that was full day and attached to the K-12 gifted school. Their version of "play" was slightly academic through experimentation. They used large water tables with pipes and tools to build, had a story-based curriculum every week that revolved around a fairy tale or story they were reading.

The one downside we came up with was that "play based" sometimes means that kids are not allowed to do academic work even if they want to. We looked at a few where there were no books and kids were discouraged from bringing books from home because that was too much "pressure".

For school, we found that emotional health is directly tied to academic challenge. When he's not challenged, he gets in trouble, which leads to low self-esteem, which is a huge whammy on his emotional well-being. We are moving him to a more academically challenging environment hoping that it will fix some of the emotional drama of the poor fit last year.

We think about both the social aspect and academic needs of our kids. Preschool leaned more towards social. My dd went to a montessori preschool, ds went to a church preschool and my youngest will start at the church preschool this fall. During the preschool years we feel it is important that they learn how to play with friends, work out differences, and have teacher's that encourage them. When they reach school age, then we look to make sure there academic needs are being met as well as the above social needs.

We were lucky in our middle son's case that he had a teacher that saw how much he enjoyed the academics side of things. So she sent "homework" home for her students and had more structured learning activities available. I truly feel that the teacher is the most important aspect to my kid's school.

Thanks everyone for the advice. I feel a bit stuck. We have two strong choices. One is an accelerated creative program, ready to place her in K (K teacher met with her and said that was a much more appropriate placement as she is ready to read). The other is a K-1 combined class, an experiential learning model- very small school- lots of hands on, but also lots of time to play and be outside. DD has withdrawn a lot and is really unmotivated coming out of her second year in Montessori. I am sure the first one would get her engaged and motivated again, teacher was great, but she is also a sensitive soul and is asking those bigger life questions, not sure if the accelerated program would give her time to investigate those issues. I do feel like I have to make a trade though on this...DH likes accelerated program ;-)

It sounds to me like you have already made your choice.
I think that the teacher is the biggest thing to make or brake Kindergarten.
Do you have the option to switch schools if it is not a good fit?