Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Whole grade acceleration or no?

These responses are so helpful. The comments here have helped reinforce our feelings of not wanting to whole grade accelerate. I keep reading literature that it's "harmful" to not accelerate kids who are ready or good candidates for it, and appreciate hearing experiences that show we're not necessarily harming him by keeping him where he is! But we still need some changes.

The clustering suggestions are very helpful. The principal made a comment that made me think they might be looking at putting those kids in a single classroom next year, but it goes against recent changes they've made, so I may have misinterpreted. The school ability grouped across grades for the past 6 years for reading and math, until the new principal came in this year and ended that practice at teacher request. Now they are supposedly ability grouping within the classroom much of the time, but not all of the time. I think the school wants to keep classes heterogenous and ability group within those heterogeneous classrooms. Hope to get more information about their new philosophy and advocate for the clustering for next year's class placement.

I did ask at our last meeting if his teacher could work to push the 3 or 4 kids who are at that level in DS's class together for group projects, and principal said that was happening. However, according to DS, teacher has not been encouraging him to team with any specific kids. And yes, given the amount of group work, and being with your grade for all specials, recess, and lunch, the majority of the socializing does occur within the grade and classroom.

I would very much like to get the other parents on board to advocate for this with me, as someone suggested, if I can figure out who the families are! I know/suspect three of the other kids because we know the families well and DS is close to two of them. The school hasn't shared that data with us thus far, but might be willing to if it's in the context of helping the kids find each other as social/intellectual peers. Will see. We have a meeting with teacher, principal, and 3rd grade receiving teacher for math, next Monday. Meeting is primarily to discuss moving to 3rd grade math daily, and to get overall input about whole grade acceleration.

DD6/K has started to ask for harder work too, so we have a meeting with her teacher tomorrow to start that process... Thanks all!