Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy It's official - no further acceleration for now

Yes, you've got it right.

I do not it think the school has a plan at all. I do not even think they have ever done SSA before. they talk a lot about giving kids accelerated work in the classroom "once they are done with their regular work" but you can guess how well that worked. They have skipped a number of kids, but those were full grade skips and thus this particular problem never came up.

Another problem is that the middle school is a public college prep track school, and legally, they can only accept kids who have a B- average in fourth grade on May 1st. So I am not even sure how that would work - he could have entered fifth grade in the gifted track in the other school as a rising fourth grader just on the strength of his test results, and he's got mostly As as it is, but this may not even be at the discretion of the principal.

My husband actually takes him to class occasionally when he does interesting physics stuff with his high schoolers in the afternoons, but the reasoning, if anyone ever asked, which probably no one would, would simply be a short term problem with childcare arrangements.

So I guess we will scramble and tweak as we always have and just hope he will continue enjoying his school for the teacher (whom we all like a lot), his friends, who hopefully will be mean only temporarily, and the many interesting projects they do.
Not sure what we could do about language arts....he reads a lot, we go to the library and talk about books and he writes long short stories and short novels (he's got a famous five novel going, about the famous five coming to our town on a case and us helping out, not sure in what state of completion that one is). He's just not stimulated by the spelling and grammar stuff that they do and does not come across as clearly needing acceleration the way he does in math - and I have to say what they do is at a fairly high level. Not that he can't do it all easily, but I think he is learning. And he's got problems getting into and finishing the assignments as speedily as it would be expected from a kid that needed acceleration, which I think is both an EF problem and a giftie problem (as in "I'm not interested, what's the point?", and he comes by it honestly, I still struggle with work assignments I not stimulated by as an adult). Not sure whether it is a lack of challenge problem, per se.

I was a bit disappointed by his lukewarm response to the gifted track info night, to be honest.
He does want to go next year, when all kids will be transitioning anyway, but clearly prefers his current school. So maybe we are just very lucky with his elementary (I do think we are, mostly) or he is so very anxious about the transition he wants to put it off as far is possible (and I think he is) or we do a good job with stimulating enrichment and extracurriculars so he wasn't that wowed (I do flatter myself we do) or the LA stuff they did with the kids really was as lame as he described. (Finding the titles of fairy tales in a word grid? Really? And turning it into a competition, with points and winners and losers, which he hates?

Maybe it's a good thing he won't have this particular LA teacher next year, and we can hope there's another teacher for fifth grade the year after).