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    Joined: Nov 2017
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    Hi, all.

    I'm new to the forum and figured I'd jump right in. I have a 7yo son in 2nd grade who is gifted in a number of areas, including math. He's chomping at the bit to move ahead and actually learn new material at school, and I've been advocating strongly to get him more appropriate work but have been met with refusal.

    A lot of the school's arguments against moving him ahead center around the math curriculum and how it's been implemented. His school uses Pearson's "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space" 3rd edition, which is very hands-on and emphasizes group learning. I was told that because of that, students in each grade learn the same material at the same pace with little differentiation, save for challenge questions, and that the only option available to my son is joining a third grade class for math. (There are issues with that, though, and while it's been offered, it has yet to actually happen.)

    I'm wondering if anyone is familiar with the program and can offer feedback on whether this is the typical implementation, and if it can be modified somehow to allow for differentiation.

    Thank you!


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    Our school used this when my kids were in elementary, though that was several years ago so I don’t know if it is the same edition, etc.

    Overall, I thought it was a good program, and if state testing is your metric, then our district performed better than almost every other district with similar demographics. I think it does give kids a good foundation. However, I have heard stories about teachers whose implementation was inflexible and rigid- I think a lot depends upon the individual teacher. Also, our district supplements almost all the purchased curriculum with teacher and district-derived materials, so take that with a grain of salt.

    For a gifted kid, or at least for my kids, the curriculum was problematic in a few ways. As you mentioned, it is group-focused, and the result here was that things moved very slowly for our kids. There was little to no opportunity for differentiation- a challenge problem (one!) at the end of a unit was typical. (Our school, though they talk about differentiation, was very much against it in practice, so this may not be a curriculum fault, though from what I saw I suspect it is). The other problem was huge amounts of repetition (again, in a more enlightened district this might not be the case- it would not be impossible to pretest and let some kids work on different material, for example). The curriculum is designed to spiral, I believe, so the same topics came up over and over, year after year, which was torture for my kids.

    Some of these issues might be amenable to changes if the teacher/school are willing, but our experience was not great.

    Hope that helps.





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    Hi, Cricket3.

    3rd edition just came out last year, so your school would've used an earlier edition. My understanding is that they're pretty similar. 3rd edition has a lot more digital content, though, and there were a few other changes.

    That was exactly the kind of information I was looking for, though. And it sounds like your experience was very similar to ours. He's had more than one challenge problem per unit but not by many.

    Thanks so much for your feedback! I know that one response isn't much of a sample set, but your experience reinforces my belief that this is just how Investigations is run. And that I'm in for a fight getting my kid math instruction that's at his level. :P

    Thanks!
    echofuzz


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