I am leaning towards asking the school to finish an assessment of where he is in relation to the current first grader’s math
You may wish to prepare yourself for the idea that he may actually need to take end-of-year math assessments for several grades, as he may far exceed end-of-first-grade math expectations.
I suspect that no amount of differentiation would be as good as being paired with at least a couple of other kids who are developmentally matched with my son’s math level.
Agreed. It is good for kids to have intellectual/academic peers, especially in a subject of particular interest. All in all, it sounds like a very workable situation with your school (which sounds wonderful) and it seems you have a solid understanding of the who-what-where-when-why-and-how of any program implementation buzzwords such as
differentiation and
challenge, and what they translate to in this particular context.
If your son were to take math class with students one or more grades ahead, this would typically be called single subject acceleration (SSA).
I want to get this right now
Yes, understanding his optimal curriculum placement for math
now may allow the school sufficient lead time to schedule fall classes in a manner which makes it logistically feasible for him to attend a math class with students in a higher grade level (for example, leave 1st grade math class to walk to 4th grade math class).
