DS6 is in the gifted program at school and in the first grade. While we haven't had formal IQ testing done, my hunch is that he's gifted, not "just" a high achiever.
At home, I can see evidence of this all the time. However, at school, his teacher doesn't seem to see it all. Our parent conference focused on his inattention, not focusing, too chatty,not completing work etc. Shortly after the conference she emailed me saying he wasn't sitting in the listening center quietly and was asked to go back to his desk. He sat down and said, "I don't want to do anything." We also just got his gifted evaluation with his first report card. He received "No Progress" on two of the five skills, research and self-directed learning. His gifted teacher said he wasn't completing his work, he's off-task and he was easily distracted. I was in the classroom yesterday and he didn't participate in discussion at all. The teacher was asking questions, kids were raising their hands, calling out answers and he just sat there. This is a sharp contrast to last year when he got in "trouble" for calling out answers.
He seems engaged at home and disengaged at school. He obsesses about sharks at home, but won't write the facts down on paper at school. He likes the challenge of more advanced math at home (until he gets a wrong answer) but misses simple things at school and, quite frankly, seems to put forth very little effort at school.
What's the reason for the disconnect? Is he not being challenged? Does he just not care about his schoolwork? My gut is that he's not challenged and he can't see the meaning behind some of the work he's being asked to do...like writing lists of facts...and he's shutting down at school.
We are going to talk to the school counselor tomorrow and I think I'm just looking for confirmation that my instincts are in the right ballpark. I'm grateful for any additional thoughts you all have. All of this is still so new to me and I'm grateful for the feedback on this forum.
Your gut instincts are correct and it is wise of you to listen to them.
I could have written every single word of your post last year. My child was shutting down in class though he was doing higher grade work at school. I am not aware if LDs are a possible issue in your case and you might want to heed to the suggestions of others and be aware of them.
In my son's case (he is 6 now), his way of shutting down was to go through the motions, get things done as fast as possible without being careful and move on to do something amusing for him - he learnt that compliance at school was important and he would do the basic minimum requirement, with probably 10% of his mind engaged in his tasks. And for the rest of the day at school, he was entertaining himself by chatting to other kids and distracting them, playing with legos and blocks, singing silly songs he made up loudly and trying to get a laugh out of the class when they were asked to sit and color or do art work etc. He would also tell the teacher "! don't want to do anything" on some days.
The teacher said that he was not ready for further acceleration because his handwriting was poor and that he made too many mistakes in his addition worksheets - he was doing 3rd grade math at home (with high accuracy) and he did a holiday camp at a math tutoring center where they also placed him at 3rd grade level.
I spent a lot of time volunteering in his calss to figure out the problem. My conclusion was that there was no challenge in anything he was doing and the fun part of the day were the PE class, music class and recess. The math challenge the teacher gave him was to add numbers like 14+15 (instead of 4+5 for the rest of the class), which was highly inadequate.
He takes 45 minute piano lessons, he afterschools math with me and attends 90 minute chess classes at a chess academy - the level of focus we and his coaches saw when he worked on content that was several leagues ahead of his school work was the polar opposite of what we saw at school.
We attribute it all to lack of challenge making the child give up on school and a lack of strict discipline/consequences for non-compliance (for e.g. the teacher wrote notes to parents when a child refused to do school work instead of handling it in the classroom).
My solution was to pull him out of his school and put him in an academically intense school and which also has a lot of structure and discipline. It has worked for us so far, though DS struggles with the discipline part of it. We still afterschool in math because he is doing 2nd grade math at school which is easy for him. But he gets a wide variety of subject matters like logic, history, literature etc that he is required to be "mentally present" all the time.
Find a way to up the challenge level of his work (either at school or afterschool). Good luck.
