Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School What warrants a skip?

Cricket2 I think there is a real personality component involved in how much a child should be accelerated.

A post from here from some time ago really stuck in my mind that was along the lines of there are 3 kinds of gifted kids:

1) the kids that drive themselves and consume input at an incredible rate - parents/school are driven by child to provide more data. The child is pushing the parents.

2) the kids that are happy to cruise along but if parent provides work kid will happilly do it and enjoy it - no-one is really pushing anyone here.

3) the kids (who may or may not be gifted) but are being pushed 12hrs a day by the parents to output beyond their ability. Parent pushing...

And there was a pithy observation about how in the "real world" everyone thinks #1 doesn't exist and #2 is the same as #3, while in the gifted world only #1 counts... My paraphrasing is no doubt atrocious, I apologise to whoever first wrote this.

But I think which of these groups one's child falls into really impacts what kind of intervention they need at school...

I am thinking your approach makes sense for #1s more than #2s - I am guessing your child is both NEEDING more and is also already thus driving themselves at their maximum pace for their lowest subject. That logic might be way off.

My own child is very much a #2, she's already skipped and she'd not be top of her class if we skipped her again, but she's not going to bother outputting more until she's in a scenario where she's got ground to make up, or at least where the instruction she's getting is at her level AND that is just normal for the class (ie she's not going to do the classwork and then ask for more appropriate work, or want to do different work to her classmates). Her first skip placed her into first grade, in a 1/2 composite class. She was far from the top of yr 1 (far from the bottom too) but with a definite weakness in handwriting (she has a handwriting disability). Just over a year later, one term into yr2, now in a straight 2 class, she is not getting any instruction at her level and it's not her peronsality to ask for more or to push herself to squeeze the most out of the instruction she's getting. She's just going to cruise along accepting that nothing will require effort and express her stress in seemingly unrelated ways at home (extreme negative perfectionism is clearly developing). We won't be skipping her again, for various reasons, but I am very confident that if we did skip her again into third, where she'd be top half of the class in most areas, but not top 10%, that she would be top 10% by the end of the year...Given instruction at her actual readiness level she will rise to the challenge. Given instruction below her readiness level she'll just meander along and enjoy life (sort of, not really, with lots of negative long term consequences).

She's 6.5, she's a little kid, I don't want to afterschool her, because she'd rather hunt lizards in the rocks in the backyard with the dog and I value her spending her afternoons doing that. But I do want her to learn at her level, and to learn how to learn, and how to work, how to make mistakes and think that's normal and ok... Her personality is not such that she will drive herself and do that "naturally".

Edited to add: she doesn't have any major splinter skills, she's developing pretty evenly, and in some ways math, her weakest area, is most in need of being forced to put some energy in through a skip. So she's not a kid with a 3yr gap between her weakest and strongest areas.