I wanted to provide an update since so many of you took the time to weigh in last week. The lead first grade math teacher met with my son a couple of times last week to assess his math skills to determine if she recommends an acceleration or in-class differentiation. Here, in part, is what she concluded me:
“ From what I am able to tell, he seems to be a strong math student with a genuine grasp of the concepts for which he expresses interest.
He has a solid understanding of place value, subtraction, adding large numbers, multiplication, and elapsed time in five minute increments. He showed a preference for mental calculation.
The possible areas of growth within them are; speed, differentiating hundreds and thousands places (when dealing with money), flipping of numbers (50 vs 05), attention to detail of operation (+ vs -), and accuracy in calculation. He will also benefit from strategies to organize his work, as well as developing his ability to show his thinking in a written (non-verbal) format.”
I agree that my son needs support in writing and organizing his answers. He has a forty point spread between his highest index scores and processing speed (where he got a 100). The psychologist who administered the exam wasn’t worried about the average speed; she said my son is careful and needed to work on fine motor skills but it probably wouldn’t be an issue. BUT I suspect that reducing his work to writing and developing any kind of speed will be an area that he struggles with. I note, for example, that while my son has quickly learned to read above grade level, his writing output, while average for his class, isn’t advanced in the way his other work is. He hated writing and drawing until recently and never voluntarily did it until kindergarten. This has not been an issue for my son in math because the work is very hands-on and project based.
For example, his kindergarten was studying money last week. They set up stores and had real money and customers came and bought things and the store clerks had to add the totals and make change. The stores were run by teams and the “high” kids were on my son’s team so I’m guessing they had more difficult sums/change problems to work on. I think this is a really nice way to work on math and keep it interesting and I can see how it lends itself to differentiation. I also know that while it increases fluency with math, it doesn’t translate to doing well on written tests. The school has started doing “mad minutes” in math (starting in first grade) so the kids will become familiar with testing and doing work on paper. Because my son isn’t in first grade yet, he hasn’t had any experience with doing a worksheet so when the first grade teacher assessed him, I suspect this slowed him down. I am guessing that some practice will remedy this.
We haven’t met with the team to figure out what they recommend for math next year. I suspect the first grade teacher will recommend keeping him in her class and scaffolding areas of “potential growth” while differentiating in an attempt to provide some challenge. The teacher has a background in learning disabilities so she may have a good understanding of how to scaffold the skills my son needs to work on. On the other hand, I’ve read that kids who are gifted in math often struggle with basic computation and writing math down but excel in higher level, abstract thinking. This perfectly describes my son. I wouldn’t say that he has a problem with basic computation but he can often do advanced, complex math problems more quickly than adding sums. The kid spontaneously figured out multiplication at the age of three and is currently obsessed with factorials, combinatorics, exponents (and plexing) and square roots. Most of what he knows he learned through conversation with my husband, who is a mathematician, or reading books, not through any kind of practice at home. I know that if we did practice at home, my son’s computation skills and writing would probably improve but we don’t want to turn him off. My husband prioritizes fostering wonder and love for math instead of building skills. We really want to follow my son’s lead.
The day after the teacher met with my son, he said that during math he did a “mad math minute” at school with two other students. I am guessing she gave the kindergarten teachers the “math minute” so my son can practice on this skill. My son loved it.
I know this is very long but I’m struggling with the question of whether we settle for differentiation in class next year with a teacher who seems to have a good understanding of my son’s challenges and will scaffold skills he needs or whether we should push to have him accelerated so he can actually learn new content next year and engage in the higher level math concepts that he loves.
