Couple of comments -
Our county has gt from k on, to varying degrees. The current program my ds is in focuses on problem solving strategies, they do a lot of puzzles and play games which rely on visual-spatial or language skills so they do emphasize fun. (3rd gr.)
They have a project where they have to plan an adventure: get a budget, work with a couple of team-mates to work up a list of items to purchase before hand, saving enough money to have some on hand during the exploration/adventure phase and they have short writing assignments describing their progress.
Apparently the next and final big project for the year is to design an amusement park and draw it to scale, again in teams. The teacher put this part at the end of the year so they would have time to phase in some of the math concepts.
In short, I have been pretty pleased so far with the ideas for curriculum, although I haven't seen much of the final work.
As for not fitting in, when I was first trying to figure out why my ds was sad about 1st grade, I thought of all the times folks had suggested he has some kind of condition such as add, asperger's, etc.
What I read about these things didn't seem to fit but they ended up leading me to think in terms of giftedness and have the school start looking into that. Still, there might be some problems which need further assessment in his case, but the turn around since he has been able to get into the short pull out program has been very gratifying.
