Hi ya'll, I've been lurking on and off for a while, as I come from a family chock full of 2E and gifted people, which has really skewed my idea of what most children are doing at any particular age. I wanted to be a little more on top of things with my son than my parents were with my brother and me. Hope I can pull up a chair and stay a while.
Quick background: My DS5.5 is (probably) MG, if that, nothing at the DYS level. He's definitely a quirky and bright little boy who thrived in a primary Montessori program and has been in K for 3.5 weeks now. We went with a parochial school that was known for academics and relatively small class sizes and said they frequently dealt with kids who were advanced.
DS really likes his school and classmates so far, and I went in with a wait-and-see attitude about academics. However, he's come home upset a few times because he really wants to learn more multiplication and doesn't want to do any more counting. I checked with his teacher and she mentioned that they do math as a class, so there's not much opportunity for differentiation (Saxon). She did say that they usually get to single-digit addition by the end of the year, which doesn't bode well. While she seems very enthusiastic, math discussions have centered around "yes, all children are at different levels, but our curriculum as it stands works for everyone."
What set off warning bells in my head was when he said that he likes this school better because he doesn't have to think and he still gets sparkly stars on his work.
So it looks like I'll be doing some advocating a little sooner than I thought, possibly for subject acceleration in math, definitely for anything that will make him think and put forth a little effort. I'd like to concentrate on math for now, as he's pretty self-directed with reading and not nearly as ahead. While he just started with Magic Treehouse books at home (and he takes quite a while to get through one), some of the reading instruction is new to him (work with setting, characters, plot, etc.) even though small reading groups are using phonics readers.
We haven't done any formal testing yet, since there hasn't been a need, but I can see that we may need to look into that. I do have a meeting set up with the principal next week to discuss some options. In addition to some work from last year I'll bring in, it may be useful to have some outside, objective assessment to show. I've looked into the DORA and DOMA tests, but are there any other online ones that may be valuable?
I'll stop rambling now...
