Also, I told the teacher my main concern was 1st grade in beyond. I didn't want DD sitting in a class next year learning how to add and subtract over the course of 6 months when she mastered that long ago.
This is my main concern as well! Ultimately, I don't even want to ask for differentiation this year when it's play-based and he's still enjoying himself and behaving well. Because after all, the more he learns this year, the more he'll have to sit still next year waiting for the others in the class to learn what he already knows. DS6 is in grade 2 this year and it's a bit of a disaster because of it.
Is it bad that I don't want DS5 to learn too fast this year, because I feel like it will do more harm than good? I know that a growth mindset is important, but he has that in spades because it just comes naturally to him. I figure he can just join the other kids at some point along the way, whenever the material catches up to him. That's more or less what I did. Mind you it only happened when I got to university, but it worked out fine anyway. School was just a place where I went to socialize until I hit university. Though maybe I would've achieved greater things if I'd been motivated all along? Who knows. Funny anecdote - apparently, Stephen Hawking only started feeling challenged once he started on his PhD at Cambridge. And no, I'm not suggesting that I'm anywhere near in the same stratosphere as Stephen Hawking!!!!! It's just a funny anecdote about him that the boys and I learned last night when reading one of the Getting to Know the World's Greatest Inventors and Scientists books. Love those books. Ok, major digression at this point...
In any case, I think we'll just enjoy this year for DS5 because he's having a great time. And he seems to be "self-differentiating" on his own anyway. For Canadian Thanksgiving, each child had to draw a picture of something for which they were grateful. Most of the other kids scribbled pictures and maybe managed to scribble a word or two. DS5 drew a picture of one of our cats and wrote across most of the page - "I'm thankful for our cat because he's the king of the neighborhood and he guards our house." He has been coming home with books he makes during class, and some of them are pretty great stories. He also seems to be able to read everything he comes across. I think he's ready for chapter books, and I'm not sure how he learned to read that quickly. This is so vastly different than for DS6, who still needs to work fairly hard at it.
