Wow, Bianca. I think your child's school sounds wonderful. I'm afraid that our situation is closer to questions, though. We have explicitly been told by our son's teacher (last year) that she could not give him anything more advanced than that grade level for fear of stepping on the next year's teacher's toes. (I wanted to yell "Step on those toes! Step, step, step!)
Other than another, or second, grade acceleration (which I would be very hesitant about) or subject acceleration, there is really no way to coax the school into providing more.
We do find other ways of stimulating his learning outside of the classroom. We spend time on the weekends hiking and hunting for fossils. DS loves anything to do with Earth science, physics, and chemistry... and so he races ahead in those areas. He also reads voraciously and we go almost daily to the library. We currently have books on how to draw chinese character, spy/decoding books, and biographies on famous inventors. (The Wright Brothers are a great example of the continual struggle necessary in order to succeed!)
But somehow in those subjects (reading and science), you are not as penalized by racing ahead. Most kids, in a particular grade, read at a variety of level, and so having a child who is advanced in reading is not too terrible detrimental. And since science is such a small part of the total learning time in elementary school, if you are ahead then you do not have hours of boredom per week. (This may come back to haunt us in later years when science becomes a slightly more important part of the curriculum!) But math... Math is such an intensive subject at school that if you have mastered multiplication by first grade, then you are doomed to years of waiting for your classmates to catch up. That leads to many, many hours per week of drudgery.
So I was curious. If you have a math-loving kid, how do you keep his enthusiasm for learning math going without consigning him to boredom at school? Should we just turn him loose and let him go through math as he pleases and let the school deal with it with subject acceleration? Has anyone walked down this path enough to offer warnings or praise?
