Help. My child is bored in every class. He has a GIEP but doesn't get any differentiation in regular classroom. I keep waiting for every year to get better but it's not happening. Gifted pullout is only once a week for an hour. My son feels that he is learning new material but it is easy, useless, and moves too slow. I'm not sure what I need to do to make sure he is being challenged as it is in every classroom. He has high memory, processing speed and is high in reading and math and really across all subjects. Thanks.
Learn something practical that he will use someday and be challenged.
I agree with Portia... much depends upon what your child wants to do.
For a child who is embedded in "the system" and has not thought much about what he or she would like to learn (because the child did not think it was possible to be in charge of one's own education)... a parent looking at the many threads and posts linked in the
roundup of advocacy tips may provide some ideas with which to begin discussions at home... thinking outside the box.
The following resources may also provide some ideas of worthwhile activities your middle schooler may wish to invest himself in outside of the classroom:
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U.S. Congressional Award for youth-These books by
Elizabeth Wissner Gross were written a decade ago however much of the information still applies... They provide tips and ideas on what to do during the middle school years and high school years to help your child find and pursue opportunities in his/her areas of strength:
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What High Schools Don't Tell You and Other Parents Don't Want You to Know,
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What Colleges Don't Tell You, and Other Parents Don't Want You to Know.
Thank you for your responses. I'm new to this. He has stated that he is interested in engineering and architecture. I'm not sure what to do with it in terms of the classroom giep and differentiation. Plus he's only in 7th grade so not sure I want to define his career now. He's good in every subject. I know I can do outside enrichment opportunities but honestly he is so busy with sports outside of the classroom there is little time. I'm hoping instead of being bored all day at school they can challenge him in the regular classroom. I don't know what types of things to ask for in his GIEP.
This makes sense. Thanks.
Thanks for all the information!
From what I understand, it's not that you'd be guiding him toward defining a career choice at an early age, but you'd be supporting his interest while he learns how to be passionate and self-guided -- encouraging him to dig deep. In the end, if he changes his focus, it's totally okay, because he's learned a lot about how to be enthusiastic about a subject, without someone telling him what he was supposed to learn. Maybe it lasts half a year and he switches to something else, or maybe he finds a fork in the road and all that knowledge he's gained becomes the foundation for another interest. My DS has two or three strong interests right now that are creative and engineering related, and practically speaking, he probably won't end up going into those specific interests (one is highly competitive, another is very specific), but he sure loves spending time learning a whole lot about them. I told him if he's interested in them, think of all the skills he'd need to go into that career (drawing, CAD, programming, etc), and if you change your mind, you still have all those other skills to take you somewhere else. He's 11 and I'm just planting seeds right now. I'm all about adaptability and mutability, evolving your skillset to new subject matter in a quickly changing society. ;-)
